Air India Plane Crash: Boeing engineer-turned-whistleblower Sam Salehpour told senators he was threatened and silenced after raising alarming safety concerns about Boeing 787 and 777 aircraft. He cited faulty workmanship and a toxic corporate culture, warning of catastrophic consequences. Just years later, an Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed in Ahmedabad, killing all 242 onboard—marking the first fatal Dreamliner crash since its launch. The incident raises serious questions about Boeing’s accountability, possible cover-ups, and what regulators missed.
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00:00I have serious concerns about the safety of the 787 and 777 aircraft.
00:05I was ignored. I was told not to create delays. I was told, frankly, to shut up.
00:19Chairman Blumenthal and ranking member Johnson and the honorable members of this subcommittee,
00:24thank you for convening this hearing.
00:26My name is Sam Salopur and I'm a quality engineer at the Boeing.
00:30I have over 40 years of experience as an engineer.
00:37I'm not here today because I want to be here.
00:40I'm here today because I felt that I must come forward because I do not want to see another 787.
00:47I do not want to see 787 or 777 crash.
00:51I have serious concerns about the safety of the 787 and 777 aircraft and I'm willing to take on professional risk to talk about them.
01:01First, a little bit about me.
01:03I came to the United States in 1973 and got a mechanical engineering degree from University of Missouri, where Senator Hawley is from.
01:11After that, I worked for companies that they were involved in the space shuttle.
01:16I had a friend, engineer, that worked on the space shuttle.
01:19He was always complaining about the quality of the O-rings that we had in the space shuttle Sarawaka boosters.
01:27He was scared that they might not, they might fail.
01:30He raised his concerns and he was hurt and he wasn't hurt and seven brave astronauts, including the teacher in space, died when the Challenger O-rings ultimately failed.
01:45Just as he predicted.
01:47At the moment, I know that if I were ever in a similar situation, I would have to come up and speak up.
01:55I have analyzed Boeing's own data to conclude that the company is taking manufacturing shortcuts on the 787 program that may significantly reduce the airplane safety and the life cycle.
02:10Since 2013, there have been serious issues on the 787 program, not properly closing thousands of gaps in its assembly of the fuselage on major joints.
02:22Boeing's standard says that these joints, these gaps must be closed, usually by a small shim or filler called the shim when they exceed the five thousandths of an inch.
02:33This seems very small.
02:35Boeing's PR team like to call it the width of a human hair when you are operating at 35,000 feet.
02:43Details are that the size of a human hair can be a matter of a life and death.
02:50In a rush to address its bottlenecks in production, Boeing hit problems, pushing pieces together with excessive force to make them appear that the gaps don't exist even though they exist.
03:03The gap didn't actually go away and this may result in premature fatigue failure.
03:08Effectively, they are putting out defective airplanes.
03:11I repeatedly produced reports for my supervisors and Boeing management demonstrating that the gaps in the 787 not being properly measured or shimmed in two major joints of the 787.
03:26Evaluating from Boeing from the 29 inspected airplane data, I found gaps exceeding the specification that were not properly addressed 98.7% of the time.
03:40I want to repeat that.
03:4198.7% of the time, the gaps that they were supposed to be shimmed, they were not shimmed.
03:47The other issue that I found when you have these gaps and you drill through them, you get some debris in the stack-ups.
03:56This is known to be a problem, you know, not a good thing for the airplanes by Boeing.
04:01But Boeing data also, you know, from the inspection of the data shows that the debris ended up in the gaps 80% of the time.
04:10Again, you know, you have debris in the gaps 80% of the time.
04:17I want to make clear that I have raised these issues over three years.
04:21I was ignored.
04:22I was told not to create delays.
04:25I was told, frankly, to shut up.
04:27At one point, Boeing management got sick of me and raising these issues and moved me out of the 787 program into this 777 program.
04:36On the 777 program, I found problems.
04:40Again, I found that Boeing started a new process to build the airplane without taking into consideration of the design of the airplane and how the airplane was designed.
04:51As a result, I witnessed severe misalignment when the planes were assembled.
04:57Boeing manufacturing used unmeasured and unlimited amount of force to correct the misalignment.
05:04And this also weakens the airplane in the long run.
05:08I literally saw people jumping on the pieces of the airplane to get them to align.
05:14I call it the Tarzan effect, among other improper methods.
05:18Again, I raised concerns internally.
05:21I was sidelined.
05:22I was told to shut up.
05:23I received physical threats.
05:25My boss said, I would have killed someone who said what you said in a meeting.
05:32And then, this is not a safety culture when you get threatened by bringing issues of safety concerns.
05:39I hope that your work on this issue signals the Boeing that they must make real changes and get back to building the airplane safely.
05:49I'll be more than happy to answer your questions.
05:52Thank you very much, Mr. Salapur.
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