Boeing 737 Max was plagued with production problems, whistleblower says

Four months before the first deadly crash of Boeing’s 737 Max, a senior manager approached an executive at the company with concerns that the plane was riddled with production problems and potentially unsafe. That manager, Ed Pierson, plans to tell his story to Congress on Wednesday.

Employees at the Renton, Washington, factory where the Max is produced were overworked, exhausted and making mistakes, Pierson said in an interview. A cascade of damaged parts, missing tools and incomplete instructions was preventing planes from being built on time. Executives were pressuring workers to complete planes despite staff shortages and a chaotic factory floor.

“Frankly right now all my internal warning bells are going off,” Pierson said in an email to the head of the 737 program in June 2018 that was reviewed by The New York Times. “And for the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane.”

Pierson, who is scheduled to testify at a House Transportation Committee hearing on the two 737 Max crashes, called on Boeing to shut down the Max production line last year. But the company kept producing planes and did not make major changes in response to his complaints. During the time when Pierson said the Renton facility was in disarray, it built the two planes that crashed and killed a total of 346 people.

Pierson did not raise concerns about the new automated system, known as MCAS, which caused pilots on both doomed flights to lose control. He focused on the potential safety hazards resulting from production problems.

Pierson believes that the production problems may have played a role in the crashes. In both accidents, MCAS was triggered when a vane installed on the plane’s fuselage malfunctioned.

Boeing disputed the notion of any connection between the production problems and the crashes.

“The suggestion by Mr Pierson of a link between his concerns and the recent Max accidents is completely unfounded,” a Boeing spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said in a statement. “None of the authorities investigating these accidents have found that production conditions in the 737 factory contributed in any way to these accidents.”

In the interview, Pierson also identified 13 instances, besides the crashes, in which newly produced Max jets had safety incidents, including engine shutdowns and problems with hydraulics.

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