Boeing is celebrating the latest employee to come forward with dirt on the company ‘for doing the right thing’

• Boeing is lauding an employee who reported a lapse with the 787 Dreamliner’s safety checks.
• A senior Boeing executive said the employee should be celebrated for doing the “right thing.”
• Two whistleblowers who raised issues about Boeing’s planes have passed away suddenly this year.

The Boeing employee who raised an issue with the 787 Dreamliner’s quality checks to his superiors did the “right thing,” a senior executive of the company said last week.

“I wanted to personally thank and commend that teammate for doing the right thing,” Scott Stocker, who heads the 787 manufacturing program, said in an internal memo on April 29.

“It’s critical that every one of us speak up when we see something that may not look right, or that needs attention,” Stocker said in his memo, which was obtained by Business Insider.

On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was investigating whether Boeing employees falsified plane safety records for the 787. Boeing, the FAA said in its statement, told the regulators about the lapse voluntarily.

A spokesperson for Boeing told BI’s Matthew Loh on Tuesday that they did notify the FAA and that the lapse wouldn’t pose “an immediate safety of flight issue for the in-service fleet.”

“We will use this moment to celebrate him, and to remind us all about the kind of behavior we will and will not accept as a team,” Stocker said of the employee who spotted the problem.

Stocker’s commendation comes at a tense time for the Boeing. The company is now under intense scrutiny following repeated quality assurance lapses in recent years.

In January, a door plug from a Boeing 737 Max 9 blew out mid-flight, prompting the FAA to order the grounding of over 170 such planes.

“Near term, yes, we are in a tough moment,” Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said in a letter to his employees last month. “But safety and quality must and will come above all else.”

Two Boeing whistleblowers have also died suddenly in the past two months.

In March, former Boeing manager John Barnett died days after he started giving a formal deposition against the company.

The Charleston County coroner’s office told BI in a statement that Barnett, 62, died from “what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” No further details were provided.

And just last month, a former quality auditor for Boeing’s supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, died after contracting a sudden illness.

The late Joshua Dean testified against Spirit in a shareholder lawsuit last year. Dean, 45, accused the company of poor quality control in the production of Boeing’s 737 Max.

Representatives for Boeing didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.