FAA Probe
The lawsuit cites only those jets sold to the military, because the False Claims Act applies to only federal contracts. However, the whistle-blowers said most of the parts in question also had been installed on commercial airliners. So at the request of the Justice Department, the FAA launched a probe in the spring of 2002. It was handled by the division that investigates parts suspected to be "unapproved" -- ones that lack the paper trail showing they meet specifications.

FAA officials said that rather than restrict themselves to the more than 200 types of parts questioned by the whistle-blowers, their engineers reviewed a list of all Ducommun parts made for Boeing. They said they found most of the parts were unique to military planes. None of the commercial parts on their own, the engineers decided, were "principal structural elements," or parts whose individual failure could lead to a catastrophe. FAA officials, however, now say that some parts are in areas that are considered principal structural elements.

In the end, the engineers narrowed their list to 11 of the "most critical" Ducommun commercial parts and the FAA focused its investigation on how they were being made at the time of its probe. The agency said it has no official documents explaining the decision to eliminate hundreds of parts from investigation. That did not follow procedures adopted when the agency created an office devoted to investigation of suspect parts in 1995. Those rules require that FAA inspectors review the manufacturing history, quantity and importance of each part that is reported as suspect and then document their findings.

In the Wichita case, the report produced by the parts investigation office details only 11 types of parts, only one of which exactly matches a part number on the whistle-blowers' list. The FAA said a few part numbers represent families of parts. It could not say how many individual parts were considered. "It's a possible situation where the form was not filled out by the book," said Laura Brown, an FAA spokeswoman.

Beverly Sharkey, who heads the parts investigation office, said the agency decided not to physically inspect the parts already on aircraft because that would have required the "destructive testing or peeling apart" of hundreds of cabins. That was unnecessary, she said, because airlines had no reports of parts failures and the FAA had no reason to believe that there was a safety problem. Inspectors visited the Ducommun and Boeing factories and said they found no problems.

The military did not examine the parts questioned by the whistle-blowers, either, apparently because officials believed the FAA was doing it, according to a summary by the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and first reported by Mother Jones magazine. Officials at the service declined to comment.

In the summer of 2004, the FAA closed its two-year probe, saying Ducommun's current manufacturing processes were sound. "The most important thing is corrective action," said Peggy Gilligan, deputy associate administrator for aviation safety at FAA.

Safety Question
Last year, the FAA reopened the case. The agency had received new reports about the parts from two FAA-certified experts hired by the whistle-blowers' lawyers.

The lawyers had provided four experts with the court documents and Boeing quality control reports from 1999 and 2000. All four experts, who are certified by the FAA to make decisions about aircraft engineering or airworthiness on behalf of the agency, and one additional expert hired by The Post to review the same documents said they believed that practices at Ducommun and Boeing were seriously flawed.

One of the whistle-blowers' experts wrote in his report that the documents "demonstrate systemic manufacturing control and quality problems" and that "from an engineering standpoint the safety of each Ducommun part has to be doubted." The expert said he could not judge how the parts might affect the jets' airworthiness.

His comments were consistent with those of all the whistle-blowers' experts, whose reports were supplied to The Post on condition that the authors not be named before a trial.

The evidence that Boeing and Ducommun ignored quality controls is "beyond the scope of anything I've ever heard of -- where an entire inspection system would be bypassed," said Sammy K. Hanson, the consultant hired by The Post. Hanson, who has worked in aircraft certification for 12 years, said that because the FAA acknowledges that it did not look at parts installed on planes, "every one of these parts [in the lawsuit] is 'unapproved.' "

Other aviation experts said that even if FAA procedures were violated, metal parts used for reinforcement are not as critical as, say, the main landing gear.

"Sheet metal parts are necessarily pretty flexible so if they don't fit perfect as delivered, it's not a big deal to shove them into place, bend them a little bit, push on them and rivet them together," said Charles Eastlake, a professor of aerospace engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., and a former aircraft structural designer for the Air Force. "Quality control people turn purple when they see that, but it's the way it's always been."

Another argument holds that because planes are stripped down for major maintenance every five to seven years, any early cracks or corrosion would probably be spotted before the part could create a problem. In fact, FAA officials said their inspectors combed through records from airlines that performed such maintenance and found no reports of problems with bear straps, chords or frames. Spokesmen for Southwest, American and Continental airlines told The Post they had found no problems with the parts.

But some analysts suggest that when factory workers force together parts that are not built according to their design, it could eventually cause premature cracking.

When you "bend and twist" with undue force, you can introduce more stress on the parts and the structure they are attached to, said John Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member and former airline mechanic. Goglia said that can be especially true of parts used to reinforce the cabin around doors, which may be more vulnerable to fatigue.

But, Goglia added, the safety impact of any suspect part is difficult to determine without an engineer's analysis of how it was made.

The FAA has yet to complete its second investigation. The agency said the same lead inspector has been assigned to the matter. "We're confident we came to the right conclusions in the first case," said Brown, the FAA spokeswoman.

Researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report. Research assistance also was provided by the Brandeis University Institute for Investigative Journalism, which Graves directs.

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