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Whistleblower from Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems speaks out on quality issues
A former quality manager who blew the whistle on Spirit AeroSystems, a troubled Boeing supplier that builds the bulk 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 fuselages before they were shipped to Boeing.
“If quality mattered, I would still be at Spirit,” said Paredes, who told CBS News in an interview he was finding hundreds of defects every day. “It was very rare for us to look at a job and not find any defects.”
Speaking publicly for the first time, Paredes told CBS News he often found problems while inspecting the area around the same aircraft door panel that flew off in the middle of an Alaska Airlines flight in January.
“Why’d that happen? Because Spirit let go of a defect that they overlooked because of the pressure that they put on the inspectors,” Paredes told CBS News. “If the culture was good, those issues would be addressed, but the culture is not good.”
The National Transportation Safety Board Investigation indicates that the Alaska Airlines door panel was removed during final assembly to allow a Spirit AeroSystems team to make defect repairs, but it appears the bolts holding the panel in place 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 checks and halted production expansion of the 737 Max following the January Alaska Airlines accident.
Paredes, who left the company in mid-2022, told CBS News that what he saw firsthand makes him hesitant to fly on those planes.
“Working at Spirit, I almost grew a fear of flying,” said Paredes. “Knowing what I know about the 737, it makes me very uncomfortable when I fly on one of them.”
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“We encourage all Spirit employees with concerns to come forward, safe in knowing they will be protected,” said Spirit spokesman Joe Buccino. “We remain committed to addressing concerns and continuously 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 behind in a supposedly ready-to-deliver component. Paredes said Boeing knew for years Spirit was delivering defective fuselages.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” Paredes told us. “I said it was just a matter of time before something bad happened. ”
A Boeing spokesperson told CBS News the company has long had a team that finds and fixes defects in fuselages built by Spirit AeroSystems as Boeing assembled the planes. The spokesperson said since the beginning of 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 the increased oversight in Kansas has reduced the number of fuselages with defects, or what Boeing calls ‘nonconformities,” arriving at the 737 assembly plant in Washington State by about 80 percent. The company is currently weighing buying back Spirit AeroSystems to further improve quality. Boeing spun off Spirit, formerly known as Boeing Wichita, in 2005.
During its earning call this week, Spirit CEO Patrick Shanahan noted an improvement in quality from the newly implemented inspection protocols noting a 15 percent improvement in quality during the first quarter.
“I think we’ve made substantial improvement in realigning all the inspections, interpreting the engineering specifications in an exacting manner so that the eyes of Boeing and the eyes of Spirit are the same,” Shanahan said.
Shanahan became CEO in October of 2023 following Boeing’s discovery of mis-drilled holes on many 737 Max fuselages received from Spirit that had to be repaired by Boeing.
The “Showstopper”
According to Paredes, managers at Spirit AeroSystems would pressure him to keep his reports of defects to a minimum. He says his bosses referred to him by the nickname “Showstopper,” because the defects he would write up as needing to be repaired would delay deliveries. Eventually, Paredes says, the pressure got worse beginning 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 by being less specific about where exactly he was finding issues with fuselages. Paredes emailed his managers, writing the request was “unethical” and put him “in a very uncomfortable situation.”
“I was put in a place where I had, if I say, no, I was gonna get fired,” Paredes recalled. “If I say yes, I was admitting that I was gonna do something wrong.”
After sending that email, Paredes was stripped 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 was wrongfully demoted. But Paredes said he’d had enough and resigned from Spirit in the summer of 2022.
“It takes a toll on you and I was tired of fighting,” said Paredes. “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 their client, Boeing, was aware of.
Buccino, the Spirit spokesman, calls the allegations “unfounded.”
The company has asked a judge to dismiss the shareholder lawsuit, arguing, in part, the fact that Paredes was reinstated after it was found he was wrongfully demoted following his ethics complaint is proof the company values quality control.
“Santiago Paredes is one of these 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,” his attorneys Brian Knowles and Robert Turkewitz told CBS News. “It is time for profits over safety, quality, and people to come to an end. Actions speak louder than words.”
The lawyers 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 on quality issues relating to Boeing planes.
In March, John “Mitch” Barnett was in the midst of depositions relating to his claims Boeing retaliated against him for complaints about quality lapses when he was found in his car dead from a gunshot wound in Charleston, South Carolina, where Boeing has its 787 manufacturing facility.
Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Spirit AeroSystems, was one of the first to allege Spirit leadership had ignored manufacturing defects on the 737 Max. Dean had given a deposition in the same shareholder lawsuit Paredes is listed in, alleging that Spirit “has a culture of not wanting to look for or to find problems, which has led to poor decisions about quality and manufacturing issues.”
Dean died last month, after a struggle with a sudden infection.
“In a way I think before, if something happens to me, I’d rather them hear it from me than not hear it at all,” Paredes says about going public. “My cry out is not a cry out to get somebody in trouble. My cry out is to highlight the defects that they well known are in their factory, but they need to fix them. So their business can be successful.”
–Kathryn Krupnik contributed reporting.
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Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenplay writer of “Shampoo,” “The Last Detail” and other acclaimed films whose work on “Chinatown” became a model of the art form and helped define the jaded allure of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.
Towne “passed away peacefully surrounded by his loving family” Monday at his home in Los Angeles, his publicist Carri McClure, told CBS News in a statement. She did not provide a cause of death.
In an industry which gave birth to rueful jokes about the writer’s status, Towne for a time held prestige comparable to the actors and directors he worked with. Through his friendships with two of the biggest stars of the 1960s and ’70s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote some of the signature films of an era when artists held an unusual level of creative control. The rare “auteur” among screen writers, Towne managed to bring a highly personal and influential vision of Los Angeles onto the screen.
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for AFI
“It’s a city that’s so illusory,” Towne told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. “It’s the westernmost west of America. It’s a sort of place of last resort. It’s a place where, in a word, people go to make their dreams come true. And they’re forever disappointed.”
Recognizable around Hollywood for his high forehead and full beard, Towne won an Academy Award for “Chinatown” and was nominated three other times, for “The Last Detail,” “Shampoo” and “Greystoke.” In 1997, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.
“His life, like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic and entirely (original),” said “Shampoo” actor Lee Grant on X.
Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father’s business, a dress shop, closed down because of the Great Depression. His father changed the family name to Towne.
Towne’s success came after a long stretch of working in television, including “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” and “The Lloyd Bridges Show,” and on low-budget movies for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a classic show business story, he owed his breakthrough in part to his psychiatrist, through whom he met Beatty, a fellow patient. As Beatty worked on “Bonnie and Clyde,” he brought in Towne for revisions of the Robert Benton-David Newman script and had him on the set while the movie was filmed in Texas.
Towne’s contributions were uncredited for “Bonnie and Clyde,” the landmark crime film released in 1967, and for years he was a favorite ghost writer. He helped out on “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View” and “Heaven Can Wait” among others and referred to himself as a “relief pitcher who could come in for an inning, not pitch the whole game.” But Towne was credited by name for Nicholson’s macho “The Last Detail” and Beatty’s sex comedy “Shampoo” and was immortalized by “Chinatown,” the 1974 thriller set during the Great Depression.
“Chinatown” was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a private detective asked to follow the husband of Evelyn Mulwray (played by Faye Dunaway). The husband is chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Gittes finds himself caught in a chaotic spiral of corruption and violence, embodied by Evelyn’s ruthless father, Noah Cross (John Huston).
Influenced by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Towne resurrected the menace and mood of a classic Los Angeles film noir, but cast Gittes’ labyrinthine odyssey across a grander and more insidious portrait of Southern California. Clues accumulate into a timeless detective tale, and lead helplessly to tragedy, summed up by one of the most repeated lines in movie history, words of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his partner Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
The back story of “Chinatown” has itself become a kind of detective story, explored in producer Robert Evans’ memoir, “The Kid Stays in the Picture”; in Peter Biskind’s “East Riders, Raging Bulls,” a history of 1960s-1970s Hollywood, and in Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye,” dedicated entirely to “Chinatown.” In “The Big Goodbye,” published in 2020, Wasson alleged that Towne was helped extensively by a ghost writer — former college roommate Edward Taylor. According to “The Big Goodbye,” for which Towne declined to be interviewed, Taylor did not ask for credit on the film because his “friendship with Robert” mattered more.
The studios assumed more power after the mid-1970s and Towne’s standing declined. His own efforts at directing, including “Personal Best” and “Tequila Sunrise,” had mixed results. “The Two Jakes,” the long-awaited sequel to “Chinatown,” was a commercial and critical disappointment when released in 1990 and led to a temporary estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.
Around the same time, he agreed to work on a movie far removed from the art-house aspirations of the ’70s, the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer production “Days of Thunder,” starring Tom Cruise as a race car driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 movie was famously over budget and mostly panned, although its admirers include Quentin Tarantino and countless racing fans. And Towne’s script popularized an expression used by Duvall after Cruise complains another car slammed him: “He didn’t slam into you, he didn’t bump you, he didn’t nudge you. He rubbed you.
“And rubbin,′ son, is racin.'”
Towne later worked with Cruise on “The Firm” and the first two “Mission: Impossible” movies. His most recent film was “Ask the Dust,” a Los Angeles story he wrote and directed that came out in 2006. Towne was married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and had two children. His brother, Roger Towne, also wrote screenplays, his credits include “The Natural.”
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