What? MAX 8 & 9 planes & senior BOEING executive will not fly on them, unsafe? What? And you want the public to fly on these death traps? ‘I’m Not Trying to Cause a Scene. I Just Want to Get Off This

‘I’m Not Trying to Cause a Scene. I Just Want to Get Off This Plane.’ A former senior Boeing employee on why he still won’t fly on a MAX plane.'

‘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.”’

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.”’

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.

What changed that year?

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.’

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/26/former-boeing-employee-speaks-out-00142948