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Boeing CEO Testifies Amid Questions About Safety Issues; Boston Fire Dept.: Massachusetts 911 System Down Statewide. Aired 2:30-3p ET
Aired June 18, 2024 - 14:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[14:30:00]
DAVE CALHOUN, BOEING CEO: We tune that safety management system into every airplane that flies every second of every day so that we can --
(CROSSTALK)
SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL (D-CT): Let me be more --
CALHOUN: -- learn from those airplanes.
BLUMENTHAL: Let me be more specific.
CALHOUN: Please.
BLUMENTHAL: And I apologize for interrupting, but we are limited in terms of time.
Boeing has a code of conduct that states, and I quote, "I will never retaliate against or punish anyone who speaks up to report a concern," end quote.
And yet, the whistleblowers that we have heard, including testifying before this committee, have reported a host of retaliatory behaviors, from reassignment, to exclusion from key meeting, to being sidelined and sidetracked in their careers, verbal harassment and threats, and even physical violence.
After whistleblower, John Barnett, raised his concerns about missing parts, he reported that his supervisor called him 19 times in one day and 21 times another day. And when Barnett asked his supervisor about those calls, he was told, quote, "I'm going to push you until you break." He broke.
When whistleblower, Sam Mohawk, raised concerns about Boeing's concealment, concealment of nonconforming parts, he was put in charge of completing correct -- corrective action investigations with an impossible deadline and then threatened with formal discipline, including firing. He couldn't meet that deadline.
When I hear about these experiences, I wonder whether Boeing really wants change. How can you reassure us that Boeing is going to, in fact, end this broken safety culture?
CALHOUN: Senator, I'm going to start by assuring you that I listened to the whistleblowers that appeared at your hearing. Something went wrong. And I know the sincerity of their remarks.
BLUMENTHAL: Well, let me ask you a more --
(CROSSTALK)
CALHOUN: And then -- and then, with respect to our company, we do have a policy. I often, often cite and reward the people who bring issues forward, even if they have huge consequence on our company and our production levels, et cetera.
My leadership team does that. We survey our people with respect to, do they feel empowered to speak up? That survey performance gets better and better. It's never perfect.
We worked hard to reach out to our people. Immediately following Alaska, we had a stand down. The stand downs continue and they rotate. And we listen to everybody.
I'm trying to deal with 30,000 ideas on how we can move forward. How do we make their jobs easier? How do we train them more effectively? How do we do that?
Our team --
(CROSSTALK)
BLUMENTHAL: Let me --
CALHOUN: -- working hard --
(CROSSTALK)
BLUMENTHAL: Mr. Calhoun, let me ask you, how many of your employees have been fired for retaliating against whistleblowers?
CALHOUN: Senator, I don't have that number on the tip of my tongue. But I know it --
(CROSSTALK)
CALHOUN: -- but I know it happens.
(CROSSTALK)
CALHOUN: I know it happens. I am happy to follow up and get you that number.
BLUMENTHAL: I would appreciate your finding out.
Let me ask you, have any of your supervisors, your managers, anybody been fired for retaliating against people who speak truth to power about defects or problems in production?
CALHOUN: Senator, we have fired people and disciplined people. And I am happy to follow up with what you --
(CROSSTALK)
CALHOUN: -- with how -- with how -- I can't -- I have concern on privacy. And as you know, every one of those cases --
BLUMENTHAL: Will you come back to this committee and tell us?
CALHOUN: I will most certainly get back to you, sir.
BLUMENTHAL: Let me ask you, have you been aware of how Boeing has complied with requests for information from this committee?
CALHOUN: Probably not by line item. No, sir.
BLUMENTHAL: Well, let me show you a sample of the data produced by Boeing in response to requests by this committee. I'll show you a bigger display. And the details have been provided to you.
Are you able to make sense of this?
CALHOUN: No, sir.
BLUMENTHAL: Complete gobbledygook?
CALHOUN: Yes, sir.
BLUMENTHAL: This is what Boeing has provided to this committee in response to our request for information. Can you justify these productions?
[14:35:05]
CALHOUN: I won't. I would describe it precisely as you did. And I can't justify. And I will most definitely follow up.
BLUMENTHAL: My time has expired on this first round. And we're going to try to stick to the time limits because we have a number of colleagues here and I want everybody to have a first round.
We will have a second round for colleagues who want --
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: All right, we're listening in to what is the beginning of a very uncomfortable question-and-answer session there for Dave Calhoun, the outgoing CEO of Boeing.
You hear Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal asking questions that really raise this idea that Boeing is a culture or has a culture that ignores and punishes those who raised concerns within.
Also raising questions about just what Boeing has provided to the committee amid safety concerns in response to the questions that they have asked. Blumenthal calling it gobbledygook. Calhoun agreeing with him there.
We're going to continue to monitor this hearing. The Boeing CEO on the hotseat amid questions about safety issues at the airline -- airplane manufacturer. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:41:06]
BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: We want to go straight back to Capitol Hill where Senators are questioning the CEO of Boeing after a number of issues of affected the plane maker.
Let's listen to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin now.
SEN. RON JOHNSON (R-WI): -- anymore. I'm not exactly sure when that changed.
I know, coming from manufacturing myself, it's been difficult to hire people in a manufacturing operation because, let's face it, we tell our kids you've got to get a four-year degree and you want to be in management. So we don't encourage people to go into manufacturing.
But can you speak to that issue, or maybe Mr. McKenzie can speak to that issue, in terms of just your challenges in hiring people in a manufacturing setting for a very high-quality, high-demand aerospace industry?
CALHOUN: Senator Johnson, and I appreciate the question more than you know. The post-Covid moment in the aerospace industry has been unbelievably difficult to navigate.
We have 10,000 suppliers. We put almost two-and-a-half million parts into a 787 Boeing because it's big and it has resources. Even those restrained.
We were able to keep more than most. But like you say, we turned over a lot of people. And yes, a lot of experienced people.
Our supply-chain experienced enormous turnover. So as we try to respond to unbelievable demand for airplanes out there, we have a supply constraint that is very real and it is not resolved today.
And I think one of the most important things we can do we've done it in a few large instances, but now we have to train ourselves to do it at small instances, meaning every employee.
If a part is not there on time, if a part's nonconforming, we will stop the line. This so much of this relates to an untrained workforce.
I add to it, it's all about that, honestly.
JOHNSON: OK, thank you.
KEILAR: There were questions there about nonconforming parts, which, according to one whistleblower, has very much been at the heart of, I think, some of the biggest concerns about Boeing.
Let's bring in CNN safety analyst, David Soucie, who was also a safety inspector for the FAA.
David, you have heard that the CEO telling Congress here safety has been something that they're making progress on at Boeing. Of course, the families of victims say that's not the case. What do you say?
DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, I think making progress is the point here.
With safety, it's interesting. I've been involved with this my entire life. And the one thing we know about safety is you'll never know what you did right. You're definitely going to know if you do something wrong. And that's where we are right now.
And to see Calhoun start with this kind of noble perspective of who Boeing is and what they've created and what they've been, that doesn't help the families.
They know that Boeing is this huge corporation that's done well all these years. They don't care about that. They care about their specific person that they lost in this.
And that has to come down to this idea of -- and you just touched on it a second ago -- that it's training of individual people.
And I think, over the years, Boeing's done a bad job of reflecting their actual vision and what they want to do down to the individual that's actually turning the bolts on the aircraft and inspecting the things on the aircraft.
They have not done a good job of that. This goes back to 2000 when I did an analysis of how they do their aircraft manufacturing, both at Boeing and at Airbus.
And there were vast differences back then, even, and it's gotten-- I think it got worse for a long time about the idea that, you know, you look at how Calhoun started with this noble perspective.
And I think they're very good at that, communicating that at the upper levels. They're not good at getting that penetrated down to the actual person that's doing the work and understanding that their role in making sure that these airplanes are safe.
[14:45:10]
You know, I'm encouraged by what I hear. I've seen the plan. I've seen what their plan is. But there's a long ways to go.
And again, they're never going to know what they did right. They can always be improved. And he says that, too. He says, we're always learning, we're always doing better. And you have to -- building commercial airplanes is not easy and it's happening.
But they have to figure out how to get that message down to the person that's working on that airplane.
SANCHEZ: To that point, we heard from a new whistleblower this morning named Sam Mohawk.
He says that in June of last year, when the FAA notified Boeing that it would inspect its plant in Renton, the company told employees to move most of the 60 nonconforming parts that they were having an issue with to another location, allegedly to hide it from inspectors.
Now, many of them were moved back, but apparently some, according to Mohawk, were lost.
David, how serious is that in terms of safety for passengers?
SOUCIE: Well, it's a plus and a minus. Though we have to look at it this way. We had a lot of aircraft that came from China at one point when I was a safety investigator. And the parts that came in were separated from the aircraft.
When those parts are segregated, they have to -- by regulation, they have to be in a separate fenced container that's clearly marked that they're not airworthy parts and that they're under investigation.
And each one of those parts has to be looked at, examined, and signed off by a person like me, by the airworthiness inspector to say that they are ready and airworthy to be put on.
I think that what happened here is that those 60 parts that he's talking about were not segregated. They were not put in a place.
So what happens is, before someone comes in -- and this is the beauty of the FAA back in the years -- is we would make unannounced visits. We would just come in and start looking at stuff.
And it was much more effective than today when they're all you're scheduling this and scheduling that and showing up.
They knew that they were coming. So because they knew they were coming, I suspect what happened is these parts were then put into where they're supposed to be, which is a segregated area.
The missing parts, I don't have an answer for that. And it's totally unacceptable.
Every part has traceability. And I've been after this just for years about the fact that they need to start using blockchain to track every part.
You need to make sure that every part that's ever manufactured on these airplanes is not a duplicate part, it's not a bogus part -- is what they sometimes refer to it.
But technically and regulatory wise, it's referred to as a suspected unapproved part. And that's what the most concern is for me right now is, who's duplicating this stuff?
KEILAR: Yes, big, big concerns. So many questions for the CEO.
David Soucie, we appreciate your insights. We'll continue to monitor this hearing on Capitol Hill as the outgoing Boeing CEO of that embattled company answers questions from Congress.
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:52:38]
SANCHEZ: We have breaking news into CNN. The Boston Fire Department says that Massachusetts' 911 system is down across the state. And officials are telling people to pull a nearby fire box if they need medical attention.
KEILAR: Yes. CNN's Gloria Pazmino is joining us now.
Gloria, what are you learning about what's happening here and what may have caused this?
GLORIA PAZMINO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, officials are directing people to those call boxes we usually see on some city corners to pull the alarm if they need the help of fire or EMS.
So far, we've learned that this is a statewide outage, as you said, that the calls are not going into the system when people dial 911.
We heard from the mayor of Boston just a short while ago, Michelle Wu, who was updating residents about this outage. She did say, so far, it is happening statewide.
And the police commissioner also mentioned that this hopefully will be temporary. We have no reason to believe at this stage that there is any nefarious reason behind this outage.
But the cause of the outages still being determined. So we will certainly be keeping an eye on that for you.
Take a listen to the mayor, just updating residents just a few minutes ago.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR MICHELLE WU (D-BOSTON): For our residents, if you are experiencing an emergency, if you find your way to police, fire or EMS, we will make sure that you get to the right place. So don't worry about needing to have the exact right number or anything as this is getting resolved, hopefully, very quickly.
There are multiple places on the police Web site you can find the phone numbers for all of the district stations and those will be available also on social media. So please, please help spread the word in this momentary period.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PAZMINO: So officials are at work trying to get the system back up. In the meantime, the Boston Police Department tweeted, or posted on X,
I should say, directing residents to specific phone numbers for different station houses around the city if they need help.
One the interesting and good things about this system, Brianna and Boris, is that once you place a call for help, it goes into a system where police, fire and EMS can access the information and dispatch the appropriate response.
[14:55:01]
So if you need (INAUDIBLE) reach out directly --
KEILAR: All right, unfortunately -- oh.
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: Actually, Gloria --
PAZMINO: -- that you might need.
KEILAR: All right, Gloria, we lost you there.
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: Can you finish the last two sentences you said? For some reason, it cut out just a little bit.
PAZMINO: Yes, of course.
So I was just talking about the advice that residents are being given right now, not just in Boston, but across the state.
If you need help, reach out to your local police station. If you need fire help, reach out to your local fire department. Try to pull one of those alarms.
The good thing is the system is all integrated. Once a call goes into the system, they are able to share information between police, fire and EMS in order to dispatch the services that are needed.
And like I said, officials hard at work trying to get the system backup. Of course, a concerning thing that the system is down. But for now, it doesn't look like there's any nefarious reason behind it. But we'll keep an eye on that specific part for you.
SANCHEZ: Yes. What a funny coincidence that her audio goes down as the 911 system --
KEILAR: She's on 911.
(LAUGHTER)
SANCHEZ: There's -- there's obviously a great concern about cyberattacks. We've seen similar things happen across the country. Hopefully, this is not that. Gloria Pazmino, thank you so much for the update.
Up next, strengthening ties between Moscow and Pyongyang. Russian President Vladimir Putin landing in North Korea not long ago, personally greeted by Kim Jong-Un at the plane ramp. Why this deepening alignment is now raising widespread international concern.
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