Boeing whistleblower claims scrap yard parts were placed back on plane factory assembly lines

A Boeing whistleblower has claimed that the company used scrapyard parts on its factory assembly lines for years.

Merle Meyers, who worked as a Boeing quality-control manager for 30 years, told CNN that for years workers at the company’s Dreamliner factory in Everett, Washington, routinely took parts that were deemed unsuitable to fly out of an internal scrapyard and put them back on factory assembly lines.

Nonconforming parts ended up in the reclamation yard, Meyers said, only after being rejected by three departments: Engineering, procurement, and quality.

He alleged that workers would do so to meet production deadlines.

“It’s a huge problem,” Meyers told CNN. “A core requirement of a quality system is to keep bad parts and good parts apart.”

He alleged that in the early 2000s, for more than a decade, about 50,000 parts, including screws and wing flaps, “escaped” quality control and were used to build aircraft.

He added that the lapses he witnessed were intentional because workers would have known the parts were not good to use because parts that were meant to be scrapped were often painted red to signify they were unsuitable for assembly lines.

And he said the practice of using other unapproved parts in assembly lines is still going on.

“Now they’re back to taking parts of body sections – everything – right when it arrives at the Everett site, bypassing quality, going right to the airplane,” Meyers said.

However, he added that based on his conversations with current Boeing workers, he believes the practice of taking parts from the scrapyard no longer happens.

Meyers also showed CNN emails going back years in which he repeatedly flagged the issue to Boeing’s corporate investigations team, pointing out what he says were blatant violations of Boeing’s safety rules.

But he said investigators ignored his concerns and routinely failed to enforce safety rules, even ignoring “eyewitness observations and the hard work done to ensure the safety of future passengers and crew,” he wrote in an internal 2022 email to CNN.

In a statement to CNN, Boeing did not dispute Meyers’ allegations, adding that the company investigates “all allegations of…