Boeing supplier 'regularly shipped defective parts'

A former employee of Boeing's largest supplier has alleged that key aircraft parts regularly left the factory with serious defects.

- Kalyeena Makortoff

Santiago Paredes, who worked for Spirit AeroSystems in Kansas between 2010 and 2022, said he was used to finding "anywhere from 50 to 100, 200❞ defects on fuselages - the main body of the plane - that were being shipped to Boeing, and he felt threatened for raising his concerns.

"I was finding a lot of missing fasteners, a lot of bent parts, sometimes even missing parts," Paredes, wholed a team of inspectors based at the end of the 737 Max production line, said in an interview with the BBC and the US network CBS.

"They just wanted the product shipped out. They weren't focused on the consequences of shipping bad fuselages.

"They were just focused on meeting the quotas, meeting the schedule, meeting the budget," Paredes alleged. "If the numbers looked good, the state of the fuselages didn't really matter."