FAA chief calls out ‘issues around safety culture’ at Boeing

After recently visiting Boeing’s facilities, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator Michael Whitaker said he found there are issues with the company’s safety culture but expects the aviation giant will get its act together.

“There are issues around the safety culture in Boeing. Their priorities have been focused on production and not on safety and quality,” he told NBC News’s Lester Holt on Tuesday. “And so, what we are really focused on now is shifting that focus from production to safety and quality.”

Whitaker spoke with Holt more than two months after a door panel blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 shortly after taking off. It landed Boeing, the aircraft manufacturing company, under a microscope.

Since the plane made an emergency landing in Portland, Ore., Boeing has been criticized following a series of plane mishaps. In early March, a United Airlines Boeing plane lost a tire after takeoff, adding another incident to the list of safety-related questions for the company.

Whitaker said something that concerned him at Boeing was that a “thorough safety briefing” before going on the manufacturing floor was not part of the process. He added that not a lot of conversation was focused on “quality, assurance and safety” because it was centered on production.

“And there’s nothing wrong with production, but it has to follow safety,” he said.

After launching its own investigations into the recent incidents, the FAA faulted Boeing for quality-control problems in a statement earlier this month. The agency said its six-week audit of Boeing found “multiple instances when the companies allegedly failed to comply with manufacturing quality control requirements.”

Holt read a recent statement from Boeing that said the company is focused on “demonstrating change and building trust one airplane at a time.”

The “Nightly News” host asked Whitaker if, despite the heightened criticism on Boeing, it may be “too big to fail.”

“Economics isn’t part of my portfolio, but I would say they’re too big to not make a good airplane. They have all the resources they need,” Whitaker responded. “There’s no reason they can’t make a good airplane, and that’s our focus right now.”