A former quality control manager who worked at Boeing’s South Carolina plant up to 2017 claims that up to a quarter of emergency oxygen systems fitted to 787 Dreamliner aircraft may be faulty. They would fail to deliver oxygen to passengers in the event of a decompression incident.
Mr [John] Barnett says that when he was decommissioning systems which had suffered minor cosmetic damage, he found that some of the oxygen bottles were not discharging when they were meant to. He subsequently arranged for a controlled test to be carried out by Boeing's own research and development unit.
This test, which used oxygen systems that were "straight out of stock" and undamaged, was designed to mimic the way in which they would be deployed aboard an aircraft, using exactly the same electric current as a trigger. He says 300 systems were tested - and 75 of them did not deploy properly, a failure rate of 25%.
Mr Barnett says his attempts to have the matter looked at further were stonewalled by Boeing managers. In 2017, he complained to the US regulator, the FAA, that no action had been taken to address the problem. The FAA, however, said it could not substantiate that claim, because Boeing had indicated it was working on the issue at the time.
This has worrying echoes of the claims that the 737 Max aircraft were effectively self-certified by Boeing after the FAA. The whisleblower’s further claims that potentially faulty parts were “lost” in the S. Carolina plant were upheld by the FAA. They found that the location of at least 53 "non-conforming" parts was unknown and ordered Boeing to remedy this. Boeing claim to have “fully resolved” this issue.
Barnett also raised the question of the corporate culture within Boeing which has also been raised as a cause of the errors leading to the 737 Max crashes. He appears to have been forced to take retirement because of bullying by the company as a result of his complaints to the FAA
Fuller reporting at the link to the BBC.