Boeing whistleblower said the company threatened him and other engineers to keep quiet about safety concerns

• A Boeing engineer told lawmakers the company threatened him for voicing safety concerns.
• He said his manager would keep him out of meetings and call his personal phone to "berate" him.
• The comments surfaced at a hearing to address the safety culture at the once-revered planemaker.

A veteran Boeing engineer told a panel of lawmakers that he received verbal and physical threats for voicing safety concerns to the company.

In a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Sam Salehpour, a veteran Boeing employee turned whistleblower, said the company repeatedly ignored his reports of safety lapses during the production of at least 1,400 widebody airplanes.

Salehpour said a Boeing quality manager told him not to document concerns or notify experts of the gaps he said exist on the fuselage of hundreds of Boeing 787 Dreamliners. Salehpour said the boss insinuated that he should instead keep quiet.

Boeing has denied any safety lapses in its 787 planes.

Salehpour also said his boss retaliated against him by keeping him out of meetings, silencing him, transferring his department, making him cancel doctor appointments, and calling his personal phone to "berate" him.

"It reminds me of, ya know, people who stalk people," Salehpour said at the hearing, noting he has a work phone his manager could call him on. "They call you on your personal phone to let you know that they know where you live, they know where you are, and they can hurt you."

Salehpour — who said he still has his job thanks to whistleblower-protection laws — told lawmakers that has has also received threats against his physical safety.

A photo of a nail in Salehpour's car tire was shown at the Wednesday hearing, which he said a mechanic told him was intentionally put there and not something the tire picked up on the road. He told lawmakers that although he has "no proof" of where or who the nail came from, he believes it happened at work.

In another instance, Salehpour told lawmakers that his boss once said in a meeting that he "would have killed someone who said what you said."

Salehpour said this retaliation is part of a greater trend at Boeing, where engineers are threatened into overlooking quality concerns due to a culture that puts "schedule over safety" and punishes employees for speaking up.

One case Salehpour told lawmakers involved his colleague inspecting 787 fuselage gaps that could have debris, and the boss suggested he should not stop production over the concern.

"The attitude at Boeing from the highest level is just to push the defective parts regardless of what it is, unfortunately," he said.

Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Boeing backs its widebodies

Wednesday's hearing came a week after Salehpour's whistleblower complaint to aviation regulators became public.

Salehpour, who has worked on both the 777 and 787 assembly lines, said he witnessed misaligned parts that could more quickly fatigue over time and potentially lead to a catastrophic event.

"After the threats and after all this, it really scares me, but I am at peace," Salehpour said. "If something happens to me, I am at peace because I feel like by coming forward, I will be saving a lot of lives."

Boeing has backed its widebody planes despite Salehpour's complaint, telling BI in an email statement prior to the hearing that the allegations are not representative of the work it has done to "ensure the quality and long-term safety of the aircraft."

The company said it conducted a detailed analysis of the Dreamliner that involved "testing up to 165,000 cycles," as well as "extensive gathering, testing, modeling, and analysis from 2020 to today" and found the jet can fly for more than 30 years before heavy maintenance is required to keep it flying.

"Boeing currently expects these issues will not change or affect the expected lifespan of the 787 fuselages," a spokesperson told BI.