The Air India crash: What had the whistleblowers at Boeing told us?

Until yesterday, 12 June, the smallest of the three variants of the Dreamliner planes manufactured by Boeing, the 787-8, had a stellar safety record.

None of the 1,000 such planes, first introduced in 2009 and delivered to different airlines, had ever crashed... until the accident involving flight AI171 from Ahmedabad to London on 12 June 2025.

Yet, at least two whistleblowers had flagged concerns earlier, particularly about the aircraft delivered to Air India.

Cynthia Kitchens, a former quality manager at Boeing, recalled asking one of her bosses if he would let his children fly on a plane with the number of flaws that she had flagged, but which the bosses were asking her to overlook.

She claims to have been horrified at receiving the reply, “Cindy, none of these planes are staying in America, they’re all going overseas.”

The anecdote has been shared in a report by the American Prospect on 12 June 2025 after Air India's flight 171 crashed in Ahmedabad.

Kitchens worked for Boeing between 2009 and 2016 and has a binder full of notes, documents and photos from those years — one page of which lists the numbers of 11 specific planes delivered to clients between early 2012 and late 2013. Their quality defects kept her awake at night.

Six of them went to Air India, she is quoted as saying.

Another quality manager at Boeing, John Barnett, had deposed before the FAA (Federal Aviation Authority) of the United States and claimed to have tried in vain to stop the “insane practices” that he witnessed at the Dreamliner’s final assembly plant.

If the Dreamliner is so unsafe, he was asked, why hasn’t it ever crashed? Just wait a bit, he had replied, before adding, “It generally takes 10 or 12 years for assembly-line sloppiness to culminate in a plane crash.” He too is quoted in the same Prospect report.

Curiously, Barnett died last year in what was concluded to be a case of suicide — a mere two days after his deposition. The deposition process for him was to conclude on the third day.

Yet another former engineer at Boeing, Sam Salehpour, came forward in 2021 and 2022, accusing the company of cutting corners in the production of the 787 Dreamliner, which allowed "faulty engineering and faulty evaluation of the data, which has allowed potentially defective parts and installations”.

He claimed to have noticed issues with the aircraft’s ‘shimming’ — the process of filling in gaps between segments of an aircraft’s fuselage. The gaps were very small, just the width of a human hair — but Salehpour alleged that "details the size of a human hair can be a matter of life and death" while operating at 35,000 feet. Of course, the Air India flight that crashed dropped sharply within a minute of takeoff, from a height of just 600 feet.

Salehpour had alleged that such tiny gaps in the fuselage can cause fatigue cracks over repeated flights. The plane that crashed in Ahmedabad was delivered to Air India in January 2014 — many flights ago.

It gets better — or rather, worse.

A team from Al Jazeera had investigated the whistleblower allegations and made a documentary, the airing of which led to the FAA investigation. An investigator who worked on the documentary told Prospect that the employees he interviewed were especially anxious about three planes they had worked on — which were scheduled to be delivered to Air India during the first months of 2014.

“The planes all had serious flaws that required them to be flown to the union assembly line in Everett to be reworked. The Air India Dreamliner that crashed today took off from the Everett airport for the first time on 31 January 2014.

While these disturbing details raise the question whether less stringent processes were followed for planes that were to be delivered to airlines overseas — as opposed to airlines in the US, Canada and Europe — most aviation experts ventilating in the Western media have speculated about mechanical failures and maintenance issues causing the crash in Ahmedabad.

On the CBS news network, Dan Bubb, a former pilot and an aviation historian at the University of Nevada, said, “It's a wonderful aircraft that's popular for international flights” and suspected that the investigation into the crash will include how Air India maintained the plane.

"If it was maintained to standards, then they will look more closely at Boeing," he explained. "If they find the plane was not maintained to standards, then they're going to look deeper into Air India's maintenance programme."