Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun testifies at US Senate | CNN Business (2024)

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun walked into an unfriendly room in the Hart Senate Office building Tuesday.

In the rows behind him were critics of Boeing from multiple angles: family members of Boeing 737 Max victims holding photos of their loved ones, and demonstrators wearing keffiyehs and red paint on their hands.

“Stop sending weapons to Israel,” one person called out.

“Make safe planes for commercial flight,” exclaimed another.

Calhoun walked to the dais at the front of the room and shook hands with Chairman Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat. He then took a seat in at the witness table alongside Boeing’s chief engineer.

Families of victims walked into the hearing room with photos of their family members. They are in the third row, according to CNN team members present in the room. Behind them in the fourth row are several pro-Palestinian protesters with fake blood on their hands.

As Boeing chief Dave Calhoun walked into the room ahead of his Senate testimony, protesters said, “shame.”

Other people were heard saying, “how do you sleep at night?” and “focus on making safe planes at home.”

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun walks past after speaking with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on January 24, 2024, before meeting with a group of senators.

Ahead of the Senate hearing, outgoing Boeing chief Dave Calhoun said he is “here to take responsibility.”

He walked away without answering any reporters’ questions.

Calhoun is scheduled to appear before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations today at 2 p.m. ET.

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John Barnett was a Boeing employee for more than 30 years, including seven as a quality manager in Charleston, South Carolina, where the 787 is assembled. He died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in March, according to police in Charleston. But before his death he had raised numerous questions about the quality and safety of planes at the factory, bringing a suit against Boeing charging that he faced illegal retaliation for raising those safety concerns.

One of the problems that Barnett cited, according to the Senate investigators’ report released Tuesday, was the question about how Boeing accounted for the parts that did not meet company specifications.

In a deposition in his lawsuit cited in the Senate report, Barnett said that managers at Boeing “directed him to falsify records that would resolve the disposition of lost nonconforming parts in the company’s Quality Management System where parts are tracked. When Mr. Barnett refused, insisting that the parts either had to be found, or their missing status reported to the FAA, he allegedly was told, ‘Absolutely not. We are not reporting anything to the FAA.’”

After the New York Times first reported some of Barnett’s allegations in the spring of 2019, Boeing released a statement sent to the plant’s employees in which Brad Zaback, a site leader at the plant and general manager of the 787 program, said the Times’ report “paints a skewed and inaccurate picture of the program and of our team (at the plant).”

Zaback said that “quality is the bedrock of who we are,” adding that the plant delivers “the highest quality airplanes.”

The question about the use and tracking of nonconforming parts is likely to get a lot of attention at Tuesday’s hearing.

Barnett’s friends and family have told reporters that they still don’t believe he committed suicide. In March after his death Boeing issued a statement saying “Our thoughts are with his family and friends.”

Calhoun’s prepared remarks begin with an apology to the family members of the victims of twofatal 737 Max crashes. Some of those family members plan to attend the hearing. In the 2018 and 2019 crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, 346 people were killed. That led to a20-month grounding of the jetto fix adesign flawthat caused the crashes.

He also plans to again apologize to the passengers and crew of the Alaska Airlines flight in January.

But experts say that it wassheer luck that no one was killedin the Alaska Airlines incident.

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun departs from a meeting at the office of Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) on Capitol Hill January 24 in Washington, DC.

Not surprisingly for a hearing entitled “Boeing’s broken safety culture,” the hearing Tuesday will include harsh criticism of the company and its CEO, Dave Calhoun, who is testifying before Congress for the first time in his more than four years running the troubled company.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the committee, released his planned opening remarks chock full of criticism of Boeing and Calhoun specifically.

He’ll accuse Calhoun of putting profits ahead of airplane safety, of leading a company where those raising safety concerns regularly faced retaliation, despite the claims otherwise from management.

Blumenthal said he and others had hoped that Calhoun would change the culture and practices at Boeing for the better when he took over as CEO in January 2020, 10 months into a 20-month grounding of the 737 Max that followed two fatal crashes.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut and chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, during a hearing in Washington, DC, April 17. US lawmakers challenged Boeing Co. to expend the necessary time and effort to reset its safety culture and criticized the planemaker's relationship with regulators as too cozy.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a harsh critic of Boeing who is chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations holding Tuesday’s hearing, said it is important that Boeing fix its safety problems because it’s important that the company again become a success.

Blumenthal is correct that Boeing is a major part of the American economy. It is the nation’s largest exporter. It reports it had about 147,000 US employees at the end of 2023, up more than 11,000 from a year earlier. It estimates it is responsible for 1.6 million direct and indirect US jobs when counting employment at its 9,900 suppliers in all 50 states. It also estimates its impact on the US economy at $79 billion annually.

But more importantly than just the impact of building and selling planes, it plays a central role in the American airline industry, which would not be able to get by without Boeing, one of only two manufacturers of full-size commercial jets. The problems that Boeing has faced this year have created a domino effect of denying airlines the planes they had been counting on. That will likely mean fuller planes and higher fares for airline passengers around the globe.

The hearing Tuesday by the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations is entitled “Boeing’s broken safety culture.” It is one of several that has heard testimony about safety issues at Boeing. Other hearings have included whistleblowers, National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy and Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Mike Whitaker.

But it is the first time that CEO Dave Calhoun is testifying in his more than four years running the troubled company. He will be joined by Howard McKenzie, Boeing’s chief engineer.

And it could be Calhoun’s last time testifying. A couple of months after the Alaska Airlines incident on January 5, Calhoun announced plans toretire before the end of this year. Hissuccessorhas yet to be selected.

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun speaks to reporters as he departs from a meeting at the office of Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) on Capitol Hill on January 24. Calhoun was meeting with Senators after Boeing was forced to ground the 737 Max 9 aircraft fleet after an accident earlier that month.

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun plans to apologize for Boeing’s recent safety failures in Senate testimony Tuesday and admit to problems with the company culture, but he’ll push back on whistleblower claims that the company retaliated against those who brought safety issues to light.

But he insisted that the company has a policy that it wants to hear from employees who have concerns about the safety of the planes it is building and that it does not endorse retaliation against those who complain, despite testimony from whistleblowers who claim otherwise.

The “far from perfect” remark is a massive understatement. Boeing has been under intense scrutiny with numerous federal investigations and congressional hearings since a January 5Alaska Air Boeing 737 Max flighthad a door plug blow off, leaving a gaping hole in both the plane and Boeing’s reputation.

An aerial photo shows Boeing737MAXairplanes parked on the tarmac at the Boeing Factory inRenton, Washington, on March 21, 2019.

A current Boeing employee claims the company tried to shield broken or out-of-specification 737 Max plane parts from regulators and lost track of them, according to a Senate subcommittee investigation made public Tuesday.

Boeing tried to hide the nonconforming parts from Federal Aviation Administration regulators by moving them out of sight and falsifying records, claims Sam Mohawk, the new whistleblower who works for a Boeing quality assurance unit in Renton, Washington. Boeing was unable to account for many of the parts that it moved around to skirt regulators, and they probably ended up getting installed in some planes, Mohawk said.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat chairing Tuesday’s hearing, called the report from Mohawk “chilling.” He said Mohawk is one of more than a dozen Boeing whistleblowers his committee’s investigators have spoken to leading up to the hearing.

Boeing said it received the report from Congressional investigators Monday evening.

Boeing engineer Sam Salehpour arrives for a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on investigations hearing on April 17.

As Boeing’s failures came to light in recent month, whistleblowers like Sam Salehpour also found themselves in the spotlight.

Salehpour was a Boeing engineer who said he was threatened for bringing safety concerns to his managers over several years. He said at a Senate hearing in April that he was testifying due to his belief that “they are putting out defective airplanes.”

At the hearing, Salehpour said that Boeing used “unmeasured and unlimited” amount of force – including people jumping on pieces of the airplane – to correct misalignment between sections of jets, and that the gap ended up being much more than the 5/1000th of an inch allowed by Boeing’s own standards.

Boeing 737 MAX airplanes are pictured outside a Boeing factory on March 25 in Renton, Washington. A mid-air door plug blowout on an Alaska Airlines flight and subsequent grounding of flights precipitated a management shakeup at Boeing.

Today’s hearing at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations follows a Senate Commerce Committee meeting last week, when Federal Aviation Administration chief Mike Whitaker said his agency is partly responsible for the safety problems at Boeing, admitting that it had been “too hands off” in its oversight of the troubled aircraft manufacturer.

In testimony Thursday before the committee, Whitaker said his agency now had far more inspectors on the ground at Boeing factories and the factory of its primary supplier, Spirit AeroSystems.

Whitaker said the FAA will continue to push Boeing to improve its safety culture in the wake of the January 5 incident in which adoor plug blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the Boeing 737 Max.