Boeing faces a new investigation after the planemaker told US regulators it might have failed to properly carry out some quality inspections on its 787 Dreamliner planes.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it was “investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records”.
The regulator said that while the investigation was under way, Boeing employees would reinspect the Dreamliners that had not been delivered to airline customers yet, and the company would develop an “action plan” for the planes that are already in service.
The FAA said Boeing “voluntarily informed us in April that it may not have completed required inspections to confirm adequate bonding and grounding where the wings join the fuselage on certain 787 Dreamliner airplanes”.
The Boeing executive overseeing the 787 programme, Scott Stocker, wrote in an internal memo, seen by the Guardian, that the problem was reported by an employee and was an instance of “misconduct,” but not “an immediate safety of flight issue”.
The memo said the company concluded that “several people had been violating company policies by not performing a required test, but recording the work as having been completed”.
“We promptly informed our regulator about what we learned and are taking swift and serious corrective action with multiple teammates,” the memo added.
Stocker said the company would “celebrate” the employee who spoke up.
Last month, a whistleblower came forward with different quality allegations about several Boeing models and urged Boeing to ground every 787 Dreamliner jet worldwide, warning they were at risk of premature failure.
The Boeing engineer Sam Salehpour claimed that the company took shortcuts to reduce production bottlenecks while making the 787. He also raised issues about the production of the 777, another wide-body jet. The FAA is investigating these allegations.
Salehpour, who has worked at Boeing for more than a decade, said he faced retaliation, including threats and exclusion from meetings, after raising concerns over problem including a gap between parts of the fuselage of the 787.
In January, a door panel was blown out of a Boeing 737 Max aircraft on an Alaska Airlines flight in mid-air, forcing the aircraft into an emergency landing.
