A former quality manager who blew the whistle on Spirit AeroSystems, a troubled Boeing supplier that builds most of the 737 Max, says he was pressured to downplay problems he found while inspecting the plane's fuselages.
For about a decade, Santiago Paredes worked at the end of the production line at the Spirit AeroSystems factory in Wichita, Kansas, doing final inspections on 737 airframes before they were shipped to Boeing.
“If quality matters, I'd still be on Spirit,” said Paredes, who told CBS News in an interview that he found hundreds of defects every day. “It was very rare that we would look at a job and not find a flaw.”
Speaking publicly for the first time, Paredes told CBS News that he often encountered problems while inspecting the area around the plane itself. door panel that flew off in the middle of one Alaska Airlines flight in January
“Why did this happen? Because Spirit let loose a defect that they overlooked because of the pressure they put on the inspectors,” Paredes told CBS News. “If the culture was good, these problems would be dealt with, but the culture is not good.”
The National Transportation Safety Board's investigation indicates that the Alaska Airlines door panel was removed during final assembly to allow a team from Spirit AeroSystems to repair the defects, but it appears that the screws holding the panel to its site were not reinstalled.
Spirit AeroSystems, not affiliated with Spirit Airlines, was spun off from Boeing nearly 20 years ago. The company has been under scrutiny since the Federal Aviation Administration imposed quality controls and halted the expansion of production of the 737 Max after January. Alaska Airlines crash.
Paredes, who left the company in mid-2022, told CBS News that what he saw firsthand makes him hesitant to fly those planes.
“Working at Spirit, I almost developed a fear of flying,” Paredes said. “Knowing what I know about the 737, it makes me very uncomfortable flying in one of them.”
CBS News
“We encourage all Spirit employees with concerns to come forward, safe in the knowledge that they will be protected,” Spirit spokesman Joe Buccino said. “We remain committed to addressing concerns and continually improving workplace safety standards.”
CBS News spoke with several current and former Spirit AeroSystems employees and reviewed photos of dented fuselages, missing fasteners and even a wrench they say was left on a component supposedly ready for delivery. Paredes said Boeing knew for years that Spirit was delivering defective airframes.
“It's a recipe for disaster,” Paredes told us. “I said it was only a matter of time before something bad happened.”
A Boeing spokesman told CBS News that the company has long had a team that finds and fixes defects in airframes built by Spirit AeroSystems as Boeing assembles the planes. The spokesman said that since early March, Boeing engineers have been inspecting each Spirit fuselage as it rolls off the production line in Wichita.
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said in a recent interview with CNBC that increased oversight in Kansas has reduced the number of airframes with defects, or what Boeing calls “nonconformances,” arriving at the plant. 737 assembly in Washington state by 80 percent. is currently considering the purchase of Spirit AeroSystems to further improve the quality of Boeing spun off Spirit, formerly known as Boeing Wichita, in 2005.
During his earnings call this week, Spirit CEO Patrick Shanahan noted an improvement in the quality of newly implemented inspection protocols, noting a 15 percent improvement in quality during the first quarter
“I think we've made a substantial improvement in realigning all the inspections, interpreting the engineering specifications in a demanding way so that Boeing's eyes and Spirit's eyes are the same,” Shanahan said.
Shanahan became CEO in October 2023 following Boeing's discovery of poorly drilled holes in many 737 Max fuselages received from Spirit that Boeing had to repair.
The “Showstopper”
According to Paredes, Spirit AeroSystems executives would pressure him to keep his defect reports to a minimum. He says his bosses referred to him by the nickname “Showstopper,” because defects he would write off as needing repair would delay deliveries. Finally, Paredes says, the pressure got worse starting in 2018, as Spirit went from producing fuselages in the mid-30s monthly to more than 50 a month.
“They always said they didn't have time to fix the mistakes”, said Paredes. “They needed to get the planes out.”
In February 2022, Paredes said Spirit bosses asked him to speed up his inspections to be less specific about where exactly he was finding problems with the airframes. Paredes emailed his managers, saying the request was “unethical” and put him “in a very uncomfortable situation.”
“They put me in a position where I had, if I say no, they fired me,” recalled Paredes. “If I said yes, I was admitting I was going to do something wrong.”
After sending that email, Paredes was removed from his team leadership position. He filed an ethics complaint with the company's Human Resources department and says he was eventually reinstated after the company found he had been unfairly demoted. But Paredes said he had had enough and resigned from Spirit in the summer of 2022.
“It takes a toll on you and I was tired of fighting,” Paredes said. “I was tired of trying to do the right thing.”
“Former Employee 1”
Paredes, an Air Force veteran, spent 12 years at Spirit AeroSystems' Wichita plant before leaving in 2022 to work for another Boeing supplier. In a shareholder lawsuit against Spirit, Paredes was cited as “former employee 1” alleging “widespread quality failures” at the company, failures that Paredes says his client, Boeing, was aware of.
Buccino, the Spirit spokesman, calls the allegations “baseless.”
The company has asked a judge to dismiss the shareholder lawsuit, arguing in part that the fact that Paredes was reinstated after it was found that he was unfairly demoted following his ethics complaint is evidence that the company values quality control.
“Santiago Paredes is one of those brave whistleblowers who chose to come forward and speak publicly. His powerful story points to the need for accountability and responsibility in the aviation industry,” said his attorneys Brian Knowles and Robert Turkewitz on CBS News. “It's time for profits over safety, quality and people to end. Actions speak louder than words.”
Attorneys say they are working with at least 10 former and current Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems employees who have raised safety concerns.
Paredes is not the only whistleblower to speak out publicly about quality issues related to Boeing planes.
In March, John “Mitch” Barnett was in the middle of depositions related to his claims that Boeing retaliated against him for complaints about quality failures when he was found in his car. died of a gunshot wound in Charleston, South Carolina, where Boeing has its 787 manufacturing facilities.
Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Spirit AeroSystems, was one of the first to allege that Spirit leadership had ignored manufacturing defects in the 737 Max. Dean had made a statement in the same shareholder suit in which Paredes appears, alleging that Spirit “has a culture of unwillingness to look for or find problems, which has led to poor decisions on quality and manufacturing issues.”
dean he died last monthafter a bout with a sudden infection.
“In a way I think before, if something happens to me, I'd rather they hear it from me than not hear it at all,” Paredes says of going public. “My cry is not a cry to get someone in trouble. My cry is to highlight the flaws that they know are in their factory, but they need to fix them. So that their business can succeed.”
–Kathryn Krupnik contributed to this report.
Kris Van Cleave
