More woe for Boeing as new $6.6m fine compounds jet repair bill
Boeing faces a fresh fine from US regulators, a payment it will have to make as it shells out cash on repairing its 787 Dreamliner jets.
The new $6.6m fine is part of an expected settlement with US regulators over quality and safety-oversight lapses going back years – a setback that comes as Boeing wrestles with repairs to flawed 787 Dreamliner jets that could dwarf the cost of the federal penalty.
The penalties include $5.4m for not complying with the agreement in which Boeing pledged to change its internal processes to improve and prioritize regulatory compliance and $1.21m to settle two pending FAA enforcement cases.
“Boeing failed to meet all of its obligations under the settlement agreement, and the FAA is holding Boeing accountable by imposing additional penalties,” Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator Steve Dickson said in a statement.
Boeing, which paid $12 million in 2015 as part of the settlement, did not immediately comment.
Boeing is beginning painstaking repairs and forensic inspections to fix structural integrity flaws embedded deep inside at least 88 parked 787s built over the last year or so.
The inspections and retrofits could take weeks or even up to a month per plane and are likely to cost hundreds of millions – if not billions – of dollars, depending to a large degree on the number of planes and defects involved, the person said.
The news compounds a bad year for Boeing; the aerospace giant posted a mammoth $12.8bn (£9.3bn) operating loss.
The twin crises of the grounding of the 737 Max and the coronavirus pandemic have battered the engineering firm, whose previous record loss was $2bn.
The FAA and Boeing reached a settlement in 2015 in which Boeing agreed to take actions to meet engineering and manufacturing performance metrics and to resolve allegations documented in 13 FAA enforcement investigative reports from 2009 through 2015.