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Ed Pierson stepped down from his high-ranking position at Boeing in 2018, a move prompted by a devastating crash that year, and another in 2019. He felt he could no longer be part of the 737 MAX program, citing concerns over its safety and the compromised quality of work.
Mr. Pierson was stationed at Boeing’s Renton, Washington, production facility. It was there that he witnessed a major decline in employee morale and also observed that safety protocols and oversight were being ignored. After raising these issues with his superiors to no avail, he opted to retire. The fatal crashes of the MAX 8 in 2018 and 2019 pushed Pierson to discuss these matters publicly and also before Congress.
You might also remember the recent incident on an Alaska Air flight where a door came off mid-flight. This happened on a MAX plane, indicating that issues with safety standards are clearly ongoing.
Five years later, after a door plug blew off of a 737 MAX 9 in the middle of an Alaska Airlines flight last month, Pierson is again trying to sound the alarm. Regulators ultimately approved the plane to return to the air nearly two years after the 2019 crash, but Pierson still doesn’t trust the MAX line — the modernized, more fuel-efficient version of Boeing’s predecessor planes.
“The Boeing Company is capable of building quality airplanes,” says Pierson, now the executive director for the nonprofit Foundation for Aviation Safety. “The problem is leadership, or lack thereof, and the pressure to get airplanes out the door is greater than doing the job right.”
In a statement in response to this interview, Boeing said it’s made substantial changes to its organization following the pair of earlier disasters, including investing in more engineers and manufacturers, establishing an official designee for employees to raise work-related concerns and increasing its aerospace and safety expertise on its board of directors. “Over the last several years, we’ve taken close care not to push the system too fast, and we have never hesitated to slow down, to halt production, or to stop deliveries to take the time we need to get things right,” Boeing spokesperson Jessica Kowal said.
Last week, in a further bid for a fresh start, Boeing replaced the head of its 737 Max program.
Pierson, meanwhile, still refuses to fly in a MAX.
When Politico asked Mr. Pierson if Boeing planes were safe to fly today and if he would put his family on one, this was his response:
I’m not saying that all Boeing planes are unsafe. Part of the problem is that people don’t know how to differentiate between the MAX and other planes.
Last year, I was flying from Seattle to New York, and I purposely scheduled myself on a non-MAX airplane. I went to the gate. I walked in, sat down and looked straight ahead, and lo and behold, there was a 737-8/737-9 safety card. So I got up and I walked off. The flight attendant didn’t want me to get off the plane. And I’m not trying to cause a scene. I just want to get off this plane, and I just don’t think it’s safe. I said I purposely scheduled myself not to fly [on a MAX].
Mr. Pierson now runs a non-profit focused on aviation safety. His foundation has recommended that all Max be grounded and inspected. Politico then asked Mr. Pierson why he prefers legacy Boeing aircraft over the MAX and what changed between these models from what he observed. Here’s his response:
I have always had the greatest respect for the airplane products that The Boeing Company makes. My family was involved in it and my relatives. I had no reason ever to doubt it. And then I started working in the factory. I had been around airplanes my whole career. I flew airplanes in the Navy. You go into the production environment, and you’re like, “Oh, my God, I had no idea it was this complex.” It’s stunning how complex it is. At first, I didn’t understand how all that came together. And it gave me a great respect for the people that were building the plane — it’s incredibly impressive to see. And then everything started to change in 2017 and into 2018.
We started having problems in our supply chain with the engines. And then the next thing you know, we started having problems with all kinds of parts. We were having hundreds of people doing out of sequence work [where parts from previous stages still needed to be fixed]. And we had tests that were being performed that were not being passed properly; one shift would try to get it done and they couldn’t get it done, so they’d leave notes for the next shift to come in.
This is not how planes should be built. It was so bad in 2018 — we didn’t have engines on many of the planes and so they put these big concrete blocks on the engine pylons so the plane wouldn’t tip. Kind of an important part of the plane, right? A major warning bell that something’s not right. But they kept increasing production rate and so we kept getting further and further behind. So all of 2018 was just a chaotic disarray type of environment.
And by the way, where the hell is the FAA? FAA had no presence in the factory. And it really irritates you because right down the road, literally 20 minutes down the road, is the Northwest headquarters for the FAA. There’s over 2,000 employees that work at that site and yet, in the busiest factory in the world 20 minutes down the road, there’s four or five employees. That’s not enough to monitor the restaurant operations at the site.
The aviation industry is facing significant challenges right now. It’s reasonable to suggest that the airline industry’s focus on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” might be diverting attention away from crucial safety concerns. This is an issue that Revolver has been investigating and reporting on for quite some time.
The recent accident in Houston is just the latest noteworthy instance in what a major New York Times investigation this summer determined to be “an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways in the USA.” According to internal records of the Federal Aviation Agency, the Times reported that these safety lapses and near misses occurred as a “result of human error.” The Times report further revealed that “runway incursions” of the sort described above have nearly doubled, from 987 to 1732, despite the widespread proliferation of advanced technologies.
A follow-up report by the Times revealed that Austin’s airport alone has experienced so many close calls as a result of air traffic controller error that a pilot proclaimed, “They’re trying to kill us in Austin.” One such incident involved an air traffic controller clearing a FedEx cargo plane to land on a runway just as a Southwest Airlines jet was set to take off on the same runway. The air traffic controller in question said the Southwest jet would take off before the FedEx plane got too close, though the two planes ended up just seconds from colliding, with the FedEx plane skimming less than 100 feet over the Southwest jet, whose 128 passengers had no clue how narrowly they just escaped death.
Below is an audio recording of the exchange between the pilots and air traffic controllers.
Despite the remarkable lack of transparency with respect to such near misses and the air traffic controllers behind them, the Times was able to identify the controller behind this incident as one Damian Campbell, a “Navy veteran and self-published poet.” According to the report, even fellow air traffic controllers were “baffled” by Campbell’s actions. Still more baffling is the fact that Campbell is apparently back on the job. FAA’s policy is not to take disciplinary action against a controller unless he or she is guilty of “gross negligence” or illegal activity.
The Times report does not provide a picture of Mr. Campbell. Such is the extreme reluctance to show an image of Mr. Campbell that the only reference we could find is from a Twitter user who posted a screenshot of the LinkedIn profile of one Damian Campbell who works as an air traffic controller in Austin, Texas. The LinkedIn link has since been scrubbed:
We encourage you to read the entire informative Revolver article:
Crash Landing: The Inside Scoop About How Covid and Affirmative Action Policy Gutted Aviation Safety
Needless to say, as it stands now, Mr. Pierson says things are not getting better. If anything, they’re getting worse. Nothing has changed, and that means another horrific (preventable) airline tragedy is likely looming on the horizon.
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