Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) has been ejected from the IAQG, and its representatives have been stripped of roles in all AS9100 and related standards committees. The IAQG justified the move by citing internal procedures that allow it to “suspend or withdraw [membership] for reasons linked to the application of embargo, export/import ban or other restrictive measures and/or sanctions imposed by (but not limited to) Government authorities.”
This comes as BCA has entered a plea agreement with the United States Dept. of Justice in which it will plead guilty to a single felony charge of conspiracy to commit fraud related to actions taken by Boeing to deceive FAA regulators into approving the 737 MAX aircraft. According to the Associated Press:
Under the plea deal, Boeing would pay a fine of at least $243.6 million, invest $455 million in compliance and safety programs, and be placed on probation for three years.
The DoJ deal has been widely derided as insufficient, given two 737 MAX crashes killed a total of 346 passengers and that no Boeing executives will be held accountable. It also sidesteps all responsibility by the FAA, which was culpable in the disaster through lax oversight and preferential treatment given to Boeing, a major US defense contractor.
At the same time, Boeing faces strong criticism for its design and supply chain management of the 787 Dreamliner aircraft and is subject to a vast publicity nightmare over its Starliner spacecraft, which has marooned two astronauts on the International Space Station.
The IAQG faced strong criticism by Oxebridge and others for continuing to allow Boeing to drive the development of quality standards such as AS9100, given the public calls for change in the company’s quality management system. BCA routinely requires its suppliers to achieve AS9100, while it does not implement the standard for its own manufacturing operations.
The IAQG Executive Committee, led by incoming IAQG President Eric Jeffries of Textron, has sought to quash the controversy by ejecting key Boeing representatives such as Alan Daniels and Tim Lee.
Double Standards
At the same time, the IAQG leadership has not taken action against other long-standing IAQG members who faced similar criminal plea deals. In 2020, Airbus was forced to pay over $3.9 billion in international penalties related to bribery and export violations, which the Dept. of Justice called “the largest global foreign bribery resolution to date.” According to DoJ:
Airbus SE (Airbus or the Company), a global provider of civilian and military aircraft based in France, has agreed to pay combined penalties of more than $3.9 billion to resolve foreign bribery charges with authorities in the United States, France and the United Kingdom arising out of the Company’s scheme to use third-party business partners to bribe government officials, as well as non-governmental airline executives, around the world and to resolve the Company’s violation of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and its implementing regulations, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), in the United States.
IAQG member RTX (Raytheon) recently set aside $1.24 billion to resolve similar bribery charges, in a case that is still ongoing with the DoJ.
Two Lockheed subsidiaries – Sikorsky and Derco – now must pay $70 million after a whistleblower False Claims Act case revealed it routinely overcharged the US Navy.
Some within IAQG and the broader standards community suspect the Executive Committee of using the BCA plea deal as a means of stripping away power from members so that it can take over control of the AS standards itself. According to a source close to IAQG, the ruling against Boeing “will affect over a dozen leadership positions, mainly standard team leaders [related to AS standards] 9100, 9104-1, 9107, 9114, 9117, 9138, 9162, and of course [the] committee chairs, etc.”
Dumbing Down AS Standards
Another source within IAQG reported that the Executive, led by Jeffries, has shifted to ensuring AS standards are more related to product-specific, technical details rather than quality management systems or process management. If so, this would mark a step backward to the 1950s, when “quality control” was the main tool used within the profession and where inspection was emphasized over process improvement. The As9100 Rev D standard, published in 2016, hinted at this shift with its focus on production operations over quality management system maturity.
IAQG is also reportedly considering stripping requirements from AS standards because “the suppliers can’t meet the ones we have currently ” and once again considering decoupling from ISO 9001, which it views as moving in the wrong direction. The back-and-forth over splitting the AS9100 standard from the ISO 9001 core text has gone on for at least two decades, with proponents of staying aligned with ISO having consistently won that fight. But recent chaos in the ISO TC 176 committee responsible for the ISO 9001 update has forced IAQG to once again consider a breakup.
A source said the IAQG has stated that “they want to run the organization more like a business.” The move to “dumb down” aerospace standards may simply be to ensure increased sales rather than improve industry quality and aerospace safety.
Jeffries is also reported to be heavily influenced by European partners, including Airbus, who have a different view of quality management than the US. One source said that France’s Safran is particularly stuck in an “early industrial revolution mindset” and lacking representatives with a post-millennium understanding of quality management systems. Airbus also pushed to punish Boeing, who it sees as one of its main competitors, according to that source.
It was the European partners who pushed to rebrand AS9100 as “IA9100,” without concern for the impact on users’ quality systems. Once the name change goes into effect, auditors are likely to write nonconformities against clients who don’t update every single instance of “AS9100” in their documents, a largely meaningless aspect of an aerospace quality system.
An IAQG source told Oxebridge that where many dozens of developers once worked on AS standards, the work has now been handed to a handful of less than ten representatives hand-picked by the Executive Committee.
Boeing’s Daniels will also step down as chair of the US TAG to TC 176 this year due to term limits. He is not expected to run again, and the committee is secretly working to select his replacement.
Calls for A New Approach
The ongoing controversies within the IAQG and ISO committees responsible for quality management standards and certification scheme oversight have many calling for a new approach. Oxebridge is holding conversations with key experts on how it may be able to leverage its “Q001” standards and certification scheme to act as an alternative to the ISO 9001 and AS9100 standards, since it is not a publishing company and does not generate revenue based on standards publication. “The main problem is that we need government buy-in, to recognize Q001 certification as a viable, if not superior, certification scheme,” said Oxebridge founder Christopher Paris. “Under Q001, a company involved in the release of poor quality cannot maintain certification, unlike ISO and AS where such companies remain certified so long as they pay their bill.”
