Buttigieg: ‘Encouraging’ to See Boeing Employees ‘Err on the Side of Reporting’ Safety Concerns

BRENNAN: “Boeing released a report that said they saw a 500 percent increase in the number of employee submissions about safety concerns during the first two months of 2024. This is, of course, after all these high profile incidents that happened, with that plane door just flying off. Okay, it’s good employees are seeing something and saying something, but a 500 percent increase, I mean, that would suggest that there are actual issues here.”
Buttigieg: “That’s right. There’s an encouraging part and a concerning part. The encouraging part is we want Boeing and any producer in the aviation space to have a culture of, if you see something, say something. We want to make sure those mechanisms for reporting work. We have both whistleblower mechanisms to let us know something directly at the FAA, but in a healthy company, that should also be happening within the company.”
BRENNAN: “Were they discouraging it earlier?”
Buttigieg: “If there were evidence of that, that would lead to direct action. I’m not here to make an accusation like that at this time. If anything, we want you to err on the side of reporting. So that’s the encouraging part. The concerning part, of course, is that any of those issues are happening at all. And that’s why a Boeing is under a huge amount of scrutiny right now, including from the FAA. The administrator took the extraordinary step of saying that Boeing cannot increase their production until they’ve demonstrated that they can do it safely. And again, all of this is about making sure that we maintain the extraordinary safety record of U.S. aviation. That’s not something that will happen by ever being satisfied with the status quo.”