After that hearing, Boeing said retaliation is strictly prohibited.

“Boeing can tell Congress and the media all it wants about how ‘retaliation is strictly prohibited,’” said Plunkett. “But our union is fighting retaliation cases on a regular basis.”

Following FAA guidelines

The job of the Boeing engineers authorized to work on behalf of the FAA is to check on the work of company engineers as they develop designs and instruct them what must be accomplished to get those designs approved as compliant with regulations.

The union said when overseeing the 777 and 787 avionics integration in 2022, the two engineers insisted the company reevaluate prior engineering calculations, citing an FAA advisory document updated in 2013 that provided guidelines on how to obtain airworthiness approval for such work.

An FAA advisory typically outlines a standard way of achieving compliance. It’s not mandatory and does not constitute a regulation.

According to the union, Boeing managers “strongly objected” to the conclusion that the prior work should be redone, “saying that going back to run calculations using the new assumptions would cost money and cause production delays.”

Eventually, after six months of back and forth, the FAA backed the two engineers and Boeing had to redo the analysis.

Subsequently, however, “when they came up for their next performance reviews, the two engineers received identical negative evaluations,” the union said.

SPEEA said that when its staff met with Boeing officials on the matter, “the manager of the two engineers admitted that he had rated them both poorly at the request of the 777 and 787 managers who had been forced to resubmit their work.”

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