‘I could see the chaos filtering down’: Former Boeing staffer blows whistle on planemaker’s practices
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‘I wondered what was going on and why we were accepting substandard, incomplete work,’ says Douglas Dorsey, a former manufacturing engineer. A long-time Boeing staffer has spoken out about problematic outsourcing and manufacturing practices that began to become a “really big problem” for the planemaker.
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And just five days into 2025, an Etihad Airways Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner was forced to abort takeoff from Melbourne Airport in Australia due to “technical reasons,” the airline said. Douglas Dorsey, from Hansville, Washington, worked as a manufacturing engineer at the embattled aerospace company from 1984 before retiring in 2017.
But as Dorsey worked on the Boeing 777 and 787 Dreamliner across the 1990s and 2000s as more manufacturing was outsourced, he said things began to unravel, leading to “chaos” filtering down the chain of command and “substandard work” being accepted.
Within his first 10 years at the company – what Dorsey fondly recalled as the “good old days” – he said the chain of command was clear. “There was no drama with executives, and we had confidence in those in command,” he said. But in 1997, Dorsey said that upper management was thrown into disarray upon Boeing’s merger with McDonnell Douglas, a major American aerospace and defense company before the acquisition.
A broad swathe of leadership ranks were filled by McDonnell Douglas veterans – not Boeing executives – many of whom had backgrounds in finance rather than engineering. It wasn’t until working on the Boeing 787 program in the 2000s, Dorsey said, where cracks really began to show in the outsourcing manufacturing tasks to suppliers.
