“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.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Video clips below were conducted in a separate interview by Pawlyk and POLITICO senior video producer Jackie Padilla.
Are Boeing planes safe to fly today and would you put your family in one?
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].
Our recommendation from the foundation is that these planes get grounded — period. Get grounded and inspected and then, depending on what they find, get fixed.
Why do you prefer legacy Boeing aircraft over the MAX? What changed between these models from what you observed?
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.
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.
What made you decide to work with lawmakers and others to shine a light on these problems at Boeing?
I realized how the leadership was treating employees — very disrespectfully, very embarrassing. Standing up in front of teams and just calling them out, and it was horrendous. I thought, this is not a healthy environment to build airplanes. I can’t support this as a senior manager. I just felt this was really wrong. So I made a decision to retire early. Just before I retired, I shared with my other colleagues all the kind of communication I had with a senior person at the company, the general manager, telling him that he needs to shut down. And then the [first] crash happened.
Ever since then, I’ve been trying to alert the authorities and trying to get them to look at manufacturing. FAA didn’t want to talk to me. NTSB didn’t want to talk to me. Finally I got a meeting with the NTSB. Then Congress asked me to testify. Ever since, I and a team of people have been monitoring all this.
I’ve become very close to [families of the victims of the Ethiopian and Indonesian airlines’ crashes] in the last couple years. And we’ve worked on Capitol Hill to try to lobby Congress to make changes. We’ve worked to try to point out issues with the FAA. And what they want is for this not to happen to anybody else, and number two, what they want is justice.
It’s only been a few years since those fatal crashes — so what is still going wrong considering we’ve just seen another mishap with the Alaska Airlines flight?
What’s going wrong is that nothing changed. They made very superficial changes that they made a big deal of. They made a giant deal of hiring a safety officer. Big whoop. They wanted to deflect attention away.
That’s all Boeing does is talk. The leadership doesn’t get down there and get involved with the people that are building the products. They don’t value the engineers, they think the engineers are replaceable. You can’t take a 20- or 30-year employee and just dump them off to the side and think that you’re going to find somebody off the street that’s going to be able to do what that person does. Then they don’t have the support mechanisms and they’re tired and they’re fatigued and they’re working like dogs — they can make mistakes.
Are you at all surprised that so little has been done to fix things only five years after you blew the whistle on the MAX issues?
I’m horrified and I’m not surprised. It’s horrifying to think that the company did such a minimal effort. They spent 90 percent of their energy telling the media things [like] “renewed quality” and using language in their press releases and their financial statements like “a renewed safety focus.” And then meanwhile, I’m hearing from people, “No, it’s actually just as bad or worse in the factory now than it was before.”
In some of our discussions, you mentioned that airlines also aren’t completely blameless in this situation. What did you mean by that?
There’s obviously a tremendous demand for more planes. What we’re seeing is evidence that the airlines are aware that there’s issues with these planes. Four airlines in the U.S. fly MAX planes: Alaska, American, United and Southwest. And it’s not like all the MAX airplanes are built in a bundle and go out at the same time.You’ll have an American plane, you’ll have a Southwest plane, you’ll have the United plane, you might have a China Southern, a Ryanair. They’re all intermixed, so they all have defects.
[I’ve seen that some planes] have
less than 100 hours on it and have [some sort of] failure. You can’t blame maintenance because they haven’t been there long enough to have any real serious maintenance. Last April, I wrote a letter to the Alaska Airlines CEO because we’re looking at his data and his planes and I don’t think they should be flying right now. Alaska had been submitting on average 95 [service] reports every month throughout 2023. Then in December, it dropped steeply. What happened?
[In response, Alaska Airlines — which did not address whether its CEO responded to Pierson — said it recently implemented changes to align its service data reporting “to reduce the number of discrepancies” that the airline reports to the main national database. “A lot of thoughtful planning went into aligning our reporting requirements with the regulations and industry while maintaining the integrity of Alaska Airlines’ reporting,” Alaska said in a statement.]
After
The Seattle Times reported that errors at Boeing’s plant in Renton, where you used to work, ultimately led to the Alaska Airlines door blowout, you mentioned it’s likely more severe revelations are coming. What leads you to believe that?
This is not just a problem with somebody maybe making a mistake with some bolts. It’s not just that. It’s the fact that you have processes that are not being followed. Breakdowns in manufacturing. Employees being pushed. [Fewer] quality control inspections.
There were whistleblowers [during the 2018-2019 episode] that were reporting that they were removing quality control inspections. And the
union has been fighting like hell to claw back these inspections. They’ve been successful in reinstating thousands of these inspections, but not all of them. And so you have planes that have left Boeing factories without [some type of] inspections that had historically been done.
[In a statement, Boeing said, “Since 2019, we have increased the number of commercial airplanes quality inspectors by 20 percent” and increased the number of inspections per airplane “significantly” since that time.]
What needs to be done to get things moving in the right direction? Is it going to take legislation from Congress? Is it going to have to come from Boeing independently?
Boeing’s board of directors — they have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that their products are safe, and they’re not in touch. They’re not engaged. They don’t visit the sites. They don’t talk to the employees. They’re not on the ground floor. Look, these individuals are making millions of dollars, right? And there’s others between the C-suite and the people on the factory line. There’s hundreds of executives who are also very well compensated and managers that should be doing a lot more. But their leadership is a mess. The leadership sets the whole tone for any organization. Public pressure needs to continue.
The government can apply pressure, and they absolutely should apply pressure. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, when it was under Congressman [Peter] DeFazio, he was all over this. He was digging and asking questions because he understood.
David Calhoun, CEO of Boeing said in a recent earnings call that Boeing is glad that the FAA paused its production expansion, which gives the company time to fix things and do right. Is that just too little too late?
There’s a bunch of planes out there that are, in my opinion, defective. He’s doing what he can to try to salvage the failures that have occurred under his leadership. And by the way, if people forget, he’s been the CEO for a couple of years, but he was on the board of directors for 10 years, so he’s been a part of this thing all along.
[In a statement, Boeing pointed to Calhoun’s previous commentary following the Alaska incident. “Whatever final conclusions are reached, Boeing is accountable for what happened,” Calhoun said on Feb. 6 following the release of the NTSB’s preliminary report. “An event like this must not happen on an airplane that leaves our factory. … It will take significant, demonstrated action and transparency at every turn — and that is where we are squarely focused.”]
What would it take for you to feel safe enough to fly back on a MAX again?
The foundation [sent] out a press release saying MAX airplanes should be grounded immediately, inspected and modified to ensure safety.
But one thing’s for sure: Continuing to fly them, completely disregarding the root causes of these problems, not admitting that these problems exist on other planes — none of that’s going to make anybody safe.