The Last Inspector

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“We do all of the...torture flights."

Bob Overby, Managing Director of Boeing Subsidiary Jeppesen International Trip Planning during a corporate meeting, per a Jeppesen employee at the meeting. From a 10/30/06 New Yorker magazine article by Jane Mayer ( http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/30/061030ta_talk_mayer ). The Jeppesen employee bothered by Boeing doing these torture flights recalled Overby saying of the torture flights, “It certainly pays well." What I have not heard from anyone about this news is the obvious--how did Boeing keep this story from being widely covered before the ACLU recently mentioned it? Imagine how employees in the noted meeting felt when the manager mentioned that they did the torture flights as noted in the article. Was there an personnel issue the manager was hoping to solve by mentioning this? Low productivity? A union contract coming up? I guess, depending on the context of this purported comment in the meeting, The old Mafia tactic of putting severed horse heads in people's beds that they wanted to give a not so subtle hint to so they did what the Mafia wanted them to do may have been improved upon by Boeing's subsidiary. In fact, doing these torture flights may have motivational effects throughout the Boeing enterprise. All an unethical manager would have to do to motivate an employee to do anything would be to drop a suggestion--serious or not--that they would be put on such a flight if they didn't do what the manager wanted them to do. The employee couldn't even notify the police about the threat as even cases of torture of innocent people under this program have been thrown out of court because our government claimed such a trial would divulge state secrets. Since when did state secrets extend to crimes by the government and those that were accomplices to those crimes? Hopefully the Supreme Court won't allow such state secrets claims to be used to prevent justice. Anyway, these torture flights give new meaning to the below quote. Could the Corporate Security Manager who said that to me have known about these flights or other things about Boeing as chilling or more so? I doubt it, but you never know. After the above quote, my statement on this site that the Boeing/FAA fraud I witnessed was the bloodiest skeleton left in Boeing's closet may, chillingly, not be entirely true if taken literally. 

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"Boeing is the most arrogant company on the face of the planet." Boeing Corporate Investigations Manager in an interview with me, May 19th, 2006.

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"Our leadership and some of our members grew arrogant in their own power, and with arrogance comes corruption," said Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), a member of the class of 1994.

No special reason for the above Rep. Wamp quote, other than I read it today and it ties in with the top quote, and I agree with Rep. Wamp's quote that "with arrogance comes corruption," as I witnessed at Boeing.

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"[The gyrochip] is a low-value card that they could find other ways to buy," he said. "If they want to buy a 737 to pull that part out, I'd love them to buy more 737s." From a January 2005 interview of David Wang, president of Boeing China, showing Boeing's continuing views on the lack of importance of export law compliance which keeps parts that may be used against us militarily out of our potential enemies' arsenals, when more bottom line dollars can be made by intentionally violating those laws critical to national security, from a Seattle Times article, "State Department goes after Boeing," July 6, 2005.

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"I'm rollerstamping--that's what they want." A quote from a fellow inspector at BCA, stamping a thick stack of jobs off with abandon.

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"You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do." "Advice" from a Boeing attorney to me in October 2003, on what my next steps were after the Boeing Company essentially decided to hide behind the sham investigation by the FAA of my report, and not correct the corruption within the company this site is about.

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"My stamp’s got a Briggs and Stratton on it---I’ll buy anything." A quote from one of my Lead Inspectors alluding that he rollerstamped so fast it was as if his "inspection" stamp had a gas powered lawn mower engine attached to it to boost its "rollerstamping RPMs."

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"(My QA Supervisor) said that no matter how much I inspected, that I would not find everything. I agreed (I had known about Juran’s Quality Handbook for quite some time, that states, when products are inspected, that inspectors only catch 80% of defects--although I’m pretty sure the same handbook probably states (I have never read it, only heard about the 80% rule) that 0% of defects are found if the product is not inspected)."

A quote from Boeing's last true inspector that I know of (me) from my first report to the FAA. This quote is very important in that it shows the inaneness of uninformed and/or corrupt Boeing personnel's (especially those in management) belief that it might be possible for an airplane with millions of parts to be built with Boeing's current rollerstamping quality system and/or "self-inspection" (as I've seen it practiced at Boeing, it should be called "self rollerstamping," instead) without defects, and therefore inspections of airplane details, assemblies, and installations, even if required by regulation, can be rollerstamped without consequence. That widespread belief at Boeing that required inspections of Boeing's airplanes have no value and just get in the way of slapping airplane parts together ever faster and faster is obviously false as my quote above shows. Yet this falsehood is spread throughout Boeing because it is used partially to "justify" Boeing's corrupt rollerstamping quality system. Of course, many corrupt personnel at Boeing are not dumb enough to believe this (they are just corrupt). They (as the QA supervisor in the above quote was) know that their surreptitious training of their inspectors to rollerstamp instead of inspect will result in vastly more misconfigurations and defects delivering to customers than would otherwise be the case if Boeing followed FAA regulations and actually fully inspected their airplanes as required. They also know some of those defects will likely be safety critical to the continued flight of the airplane at some point in service. However, the bottom line at Boeing (and their annual merit bonuses) demands that they coerce their inspectors into rollerstamping, as my supervisor was attempting to do in the above quote. There is another falsehood foisted upon inspectors to get them  to rollerstamp that is also evident in the above quote--effectively stating, "no matter how much we inspect, we will never find everything, so why bother trying to inspect Boeing airplanes at all?" As you can see, Boeing management uses whatever methods it can (even deceit and coercion) to get the unethical and/or illegal behavior it wants from employees (in this case rollerstamping of work as acceptable when it never was actually inspected).