Taki's Mag

You can fly safely this Christmas knowing that hundreds of federal agencies and their private contractors are working around the clock to keep the hijackers and bombers out of your economy-class seats. Sit back, buy a double Scotch and soda, and watch the runway lights disappear below as you soar off to Christmas or Hanukkah bliss. Look around. Feeling smug? The bearded young man with the “Free Palestine” tote bag was not allowed to board. Men you’ve never met have been blown away by unpiloted flying bombs to keep them off your flight.

So you are safe, right?

Not since their new and faster jets disrupted Tony Curtis’s carefully balanced love life in the 1965 comedy Boeing Boeing has the Boeing Company caused such worry. The film was about a man who happily juggled romances with three stewardesses who were never in Paris at the same time due to their work schedules. When Boeing brought in the faster jets, the women’s extra Parisian layover time caused scheduling conflicts for Curtis.

Tony’s worries were small beer compared to Boeing’s most recent scandal.

Luckily for Boeing, the self-anointed “mainstream media” has protected you from the allegation that vital components in its 737NG (New Generation) aircraft’s fuselage were hammered and cut together by hand in a small Ducommun factory in Gardena, California. A working-class LA suburb, Gardena has been a haven for low corporate and property taxes since 1936, when Ernie Primm opened the town’s first poker club. Taxes from the clubs kept the City Council going, often with extra subventions to individual councilmen. I don’t know what Gardena is like now, but in the 1950s, its corruption was a smalltime version of Chicago’s.

Once Ducommun made the parts by hand in Gardena, they shipped them to Boeing’s Wichita assembly plant. In Wichita, workers assigned to make the parts fit other parts found that, well, they didn’t. That is what is contended in the lawsuit brought by three Boeing employees who were fired after alerting management to the faults.

Boeing doesn’t own a network, but the U.S. media are politely ignoring the lawsuit alleging that the 737NGs it manufactured with Ducommun parts between 1994 and 2001 are unsafe. The West Coast radical magazine Mother Jones wrote about this in 2005, but it didn’t rate much attention elsewhere.

Last week, Al Jazeera’s English television channel broadcast an investigative documentary about Boeing, On a Wing and a Prayer. Watch the film to see what a good documentary does. The filmmakers followed the trail step-by-step, the old-fashioned way. They ferreted out documents and interviewed key witnesses. Such reporting used to characterize ABC News’ Close-Up (which once exposed the Israeli machinations behind the 1982 massacres in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps), CBS News’ 60 Minutes, ABC’s Nightline when Ted Koppel and Tom Bettag ran it, BBC’s Panorama, and Thames Television’s This Week. Thames’s courage in broadcasting Death on the Rock in 1988 is thought to have cost the company its broadcast license.

The big networks don’t bother with that kind of “investigative” thing anymore, not when they can interview Britney Spears about her thongs and “reveal” that some actor somewhere is cheating on some actress. Why would NBC investigate defense-contract lobbying by its parent company General Electric? Would it make sense for ABC to look into the property deals and hiring practices of its owner, Disney? Would anyone at Fox last long proposing a documentary on illegal telephone tapping by Rupert Murdoch’s London journalists? Would GE, Disney, and Newscorp’s board members want their reporters to expose other corporate boardrooms with whom they do business and socialize?

On a Wing and a Prayer begins:

For more than a year, Al Jazeera has been investigating allegations—made in U.S. Federal Court proceedings—that between 1996 and 2004 ill-fitting, illegal, and dangerous parts were assembled onto many of the most commonly used passenger planes in the world today.

The investigation originated with complaints from Wichita employees who could not make the Ducommun parts fit. The parts were essential aircraft body components, not armrests or floor carpets.

Boeing had appointed Gigi Prewitt, who was the third generation of her family to work for a company she loved, to oversee parts purchasing for the 737NG. Shop personnel, proud of their work and unwilling to cause anyone’s death, told her something was wrong. Since the parts didn’t fit properly, they caused stress to the fuselage assembly.

Gigi Prewitt and another staffer, Taylor Smith, entrusted the problem to Boeing management. Senior Boeing officials sent a memorandum to top management in August 2000 that warned:

The severity of these conditions is documented via photographs and poses a quality risk to the production of quality airplane parts….Misrepresentation of the manufacturing process jeopardizes the integrity of airplane parts…this situation cannot be ignored….

The situation was ignored. The whistle-blowers lost their jobs. The FAA, that federal agency ostensibly responsible for your safety this Christmas, apparently did nothing beyond checking the Ducommun website.

I didn’t report this story, so I cannot accuse anyone at Boeing of taking kickbacks from Ducommun or anyone at the FAA of accepting bribes from Boeing. I will say that the FAA seemed to be as diligent with Boeing as the SEC was with Bernie Madoff.

If the 737NG’s faults were suspected to be Al-Qaeda saboteurs’ handiwork, you can bet your airfare that the FBI, CIA, FAA, federal marshals, and the rest of the security apparatus would be fighting like hell to make the collar. The culprits would spend the rest of their lives in prison or worse. Yet Boeing and Ducommun’s executives are not even under investigation except by Mother Jones and Al Jazeera.

The film added that the plane has already come apart in accidents involving death and injury, but the company insists the breakups were unrelated to the Ducommun parts. Happy flying.