I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period and I can absolutely guarantee this happened.
First, Boeing's corporate culture is the worst sh/tshow I have ever experienced. All large corporations have a lot of internal issues and problems but nothing like the Lazy B. It was like working in a company designed by Kafka. I signed up at Boeing as a programmer. When I showed up at my first day of work, the first words out of my supervisor's mouth were, "I don't know why you are here, we have no need for programmers." (The Boeing interview process is done so that at no point, do you ever have contact or communication with the team you will be working with.)
So, basically, I was cutting and pasting cells in Excel spreadsheets and doing ad hoc project management during my time there. They did have need for a programmer, but I didn't have access to install any programming software on my machine because no one knew who the local IT person was. No one. It was a year before I was able to figure that out and only because I was bored one day and was walking around the building and found the guy's cubicle by accident.
To be fair, the aging aircraft division that I was in was notoriously bad, even for Boeing. It was where they put people that the union wouldn't let Boeing fire. I would conservatively estimate 30% of my co-workers were full-blown sociopaths who would actively work to sabotage and ruin other people's work. Another 50% of the people there blatantly goofed off all day, reading the newspaper or books with their feet up on their desks (literally). The remaining 20% were people who actually cared about airplane passengers not dying and worked themselves half to death to keep things afloat. I'll give a quick shout out to Anastasia, James and all the contract workers who actually did their jobs. There are probably a few thousand people around the world who aren't dead because of you.
Anyhow, James (or was it Jim? It's been a while.) was a grouchy old engineer they stuck me next to. He was close to retirement and clearly wasn't too stoked about losing half his cubicle to an unwanted programmer that showed up one day. James had a bunch of photos of an old 747 and structural diagrams pinned to his cubicle wall. One day, I asked what those were.
They were pictures and failure analysis diagrams of [JAL 123](
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123), the single worst single airplane disaster in history. 520 people died. It was because a couple of Boeing engineers #%&*$# up. That 747SR had had a tailstrike incident on takeoff that damaged the rear pressure dome. A team of Boeing AOG (Airplane On the Ground) mechanics were flown out there to fix it. To oversimplify, they rushed and accidentally did the equivalent of 1+1=1 on one of their stress calculations. It was an error very similar to the infamous [Hyatt Regency walkway collapse](
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse). 12,318 flights later, (well before what should have been at least 25-30,000 flight cycles that the crack inspection cycle would have assumed) the rear bullkhead ripped out mid flight and severed all hydraulic control lines. The plane lost all control and flew in a rollercoaster trajectory for 32 minutes before running into the side of a mountain. Many of the passengers had time to write goodbye letters to their loved ones. James had those photos and diagrams on his cubicle so that every day, he could look at them and remind himself of why his job was important and why he couldn't cut corners.
James was clearly an incredibly knowledgeable and talented engineer. He was the widely acknowledged expert in the entire department. If any other engineer had a question, they would always come to him for advice. So why was such a good engineer relegated to a department full of #%&*$# and malcontents? Because he wouldn't cut corners on safety.
This was the final stages of the 787 rollout, which was behind schedule and full of issues. James had constantly raised red flags about safety corners Boeing was cutting on the 787 rollout. Things like putting the plane out before there was a good understanding of crack propagation speed, nondestructive testing protocols and repair protocols for all the carbon fiber on the plane. These were extremely serious issues that Boeing swept under the rug to get the 787 out faster. Because he wouldn't toe the line on this, James got exiled to the #%&*$# little backwater I ran into him at where he was counting the days until he could retire and spend his time SCUBA diving out at Edmonds.
To this day, I refuse to fly on a 787. I'm sure that the Dreamliners that came off the assembly line after about a year or so were fine but there's that first year of production that, as far as I'm concerned, are ticking time bombs. I talked to many engineers who had worked on that program to know just how badly they rushed that initial production.
So, as far as I'm concerned, #%&*$# Boeing. This was inevitable. I'm honestly shocked it took this long for something like this to happen.
