New York:

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun will likely face tough questions Tuesday when a Senate panel grills the executive on safety problems, manufacturing missteps and alleged efforts to intimidate whistleblowers.

The hearing, an examination of “Boeing’s Broken Safety Culture,” follows an April session of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations featuring a Boeing engineer who testified that he was punished for raising safety questions about the top-selling 787 Dreamliner and 777.

“Five years ago, Boeing made a promise to overhaul its safety practices and culture. That promise proved empty, and the American people deserve an explanation,” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal said earlier this month.

“Years of putting profits ahead of safety, stock price ahead of quality, and production speed ahead of responsibility has brought Boeing to this moment of reckoning, and its hollow promises can no longer stand.”

The whistleblower allegations surrounding the 787 and 777 are only one of the myriad issues facing Boeing that could come up on Tuesday.

The company is also implementing safety upgrades under the tight supervision of the Federal Aviation Administration after a fuselage panel on a 737 MAX blew out mid-flight in January, necessitating an emergency landing and leading to a brief grounding of some MAX planes.

The Department of Justice meanwhile concluded in May that Boeing could be prosecuted for violating a criminal settlement following two fatal 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019, off Indonesia and in Ethiopia.

Next steps around a decision on whether to prosecute will come next month.

Calhoun has previously apologized for the Alaska Airlines incident and announced production halts and other steps to improve safety and quality assurance.

In Calhoun’s opening statement, released by Boeing ahead of the hearing, the CEO reiterated those points, emphasizing that the company has strict policies prohibiting retaliation against employees who report problems.

“Our culture is far from perfect, but we are taking action and making progress,” Calhoun said. “We understand the gravity, and we are committed to moving forward with transparency and accountability, while elevating employee engagement.”

Whistleblower alleges safety issues 

At the April 17 hearing, witnesses painted a disturbing picture of a company that blew off safety questions and sidelined critics as it chased faster production and bigger profits.

The star witness was engineer Sam Salehpour who went public with allegations that, because of flawed manufacturing processes, the Dreamliner could suffer from premature fatigue, resulting in a potentially catastrophic accident because of excessively large gaps in the plane’s assembly.

Boeing has pointed to extensive testing that it says proves the 787 is safe.

Salehpour also testified that he was blackballed by company higher-ups and feared for his personal well-being after raising concerns about safety.

In connection with the probe, Blumenthal and Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, sent a letter to Calhoun seeking records that would shed light on Salehpour’s allegations about the 787 and 777, as well as records relating to Boeing’s whistleblower policies and protocols.

The same two senators also sent a letter to FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker related to the allegations, as well as other ongoing Boeing-related matters, such as a six-week FAA audit of the company following the Alaska Airlines incident.

Joining the hearing will be family members who lost relatives in the 2018 and 2019 MAX crashes, which together claimed 346 lives.

“I flew from England to Washington, DC, to hear in-person what the Boeing CEO has to say to the Senate and to the world about any safety improvements made at that corporation,” said Zipporah Kuria, who lost her father in the 2019 crash.

“I also continue to press the US government to hold Boeing and its corporate executives criminally responsible for the deaths of 346 people. We will not rest until we see justice.”

Calhoun, who will be accompanied at the hearing by Boeing Chief Engineer Howard McKenzie, apologized to the MAX families in his written remarks, saying “we are deeply sorry for your losses.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

The government’s biggest claim to success in aviation since 2014 is building “74 airports in seven years”, as opposed to the same number built in the seven decades since Independence. However, only 11 of these airports have actually been built from scratch, while 15 airports have fallen into disuse over this period, due to the collapse of almost half the routes launched under the regional connectivity scheme (RCS).

In the recent past, airport development has primarily been undertaken under the RCS, which was launched in 2017 to improve air connectivity for smaller cities, and to redevelop under-utilised airports. This largely involved the revival of old airstrips that were either lying unused or were used sparsely.

The government launched 479 routes to revive these airports, out of which 225 have since ceased operations, according to the Ministry of Civil Aviation’s response to questions from The Hindu.

Beyond the stats

Only 11 greenfield airports have become operational since May 2014, according to the Minister of State for Civil Aviation V.K. Singh’s reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha on July 24. These include the airports at Mopa in Goa, Shirdi and Sindhudurg in Maharashtra, Kalaburagi and Shivamogga in Karnataka, Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh, Orvakal (Kurnool) in Andhra Pradesh, Durgapur in West Bengal, Pakyong in Sikkim, Kannur in Kerala, and Donyi Polo in Arunachal Pradesh.

The figure of 74 new airports, regularly trotted out by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well as Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, includes nine heliports and two waterdromes. These two waterdromes, built for seaplanes between Gujarat’s Gandhinagar and the Statue of Unity in Kevadia, closed down soon after the PM’s launch in October 2020, as SpiceJet discontinued its flights after a “change in technical requirements”, the airline told The Hindu in response to a questionnaire.

As many as 15 airports, including Sikkim’s only airport in Pakyong, and those in Punjab’s Adampur, Pathankot, and Ludhiana do not see any flights anymore, according to a senior government official.

Subsidising routes

The RCS, also known as the Ude Desh Ka Aam Nagrik scheme, was launched with the aim of taking flying to the masses by improving air connectivity for tier-2 and tier-3 cities, and subsidising air travel on these routes.

The routes are awarded after a bidding process, and the winning airlines are given certain incentives, along with viability gap funding (or a subsidy) equivalent to 50% of the seating capacity on their aircraft. In return, the airlines sell 50% of their seats at a flat rate of ₹2,500 per hour of flight, in order to make air travel affordable. The cost of the subsidy is borne by Indian airlines flying on non-RCS routes, who pay an RCS levy of ₹15,000 per departure, as per the latest revision that came into effect in April 2023. The airlines further pass the levy on to their passengers on non-RCS flights. A total sum of ₹2,038 crore has been collected as RCS levy.

The scheme also set aside a sum of ₹4,500 crore to revive old airports by recarpeting runways and erecting terminal buildings. Of these, 46 airports have been redeveloped by the Airports Authority of India, and the remaining by State governments and Public Sector Units. The government has so far spent ₹3,490 crore on these airports. The Finance Ministry approved another ₹1,000 crore for this purpose in May this year, for a period of three years.

Commercially unviable

Of the 225 routes that have ceased operations, 128 routes shut down even before completing the mandatory three-year period under the scheme. Airlines found 70 of these routes to be commercially unviable despite the subsidy, while the remaining 58 have been cancelled either due to “non-compliance” by the airline operator, or the airline surrendering routes, or the airline companies shutting down, as in the case of Air Deccan and Air Odisha.

As many as 97 routes shut down after completing the three-year period during which the government provides support. The objective of the scheme was that after the three-year period, airlines would be able to sustain operations on their own without government support, but out of the 155 routes that have completed three years, only 58 have survived.

SpiceJet, which bagged 74 routes — or every one in five routes awarded to airlines under the scheme — now flies on only 20 of them, forcing the AAI to send it multiple show-cause notices, warning that its security deposit would be forfeited.

The airline said it could not operate 12 routes as airports such as Thanjavur, Moradabad, Saharanpur and Ayodhya were not ready for operations. For the remaining routes, the airline said that it “tried hard to establish these markets, but passenger demand remained very low.”