By Samantha Flom
Boeing is concealing vital information from investigators regarding how a door plug blew off of one of its 737 Max 9 jets in the middle of a January Alaska Airlines flight, a whistleblower has alleged.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat this. This is a criminal cover-up,” former Boeing manager Ed Pierson told an investigative panel of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on April 17.
Boeing leadership told Congress last month that documents detailing work on the faulty door plug could not be found, suggesting that they were likely never created.
However, Mr. Pierson, now the executive director of the Foundation for Aviation Safety, said those documents do exist.
“I know this because I’ve personally passed them to the FBI,” he said.
The Epoch Times has contacted Boeing for comment.
Wednesday was not Mr. Pierson’s first time sounding the alarm over Boeing’s practices. In December 2019, following two 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people collectively, he testified before Congress about Boeing’s “rushed” production operations.
Yet even after those tragedies, Mr. Pierson said, “nothing changed” at Boeing.
“There was no accountability, not a single person from Boeing went to jail, hundreds of people died, and there’s been no justice,” he said. “Unless action is taken and leaders are held accountable, every person stepping aboard a Boeing airplane is at risk.”
Current Boeing quality engineer Sam Salehpour, another whistleblower, echoed that concern.
“They are putting out defective airplanes,” Mr. Salehpour told the committee, alleging that Boeing was taking “shortcuts” to ramp up production.
He noted that he had personally observed gaps in the fuselage of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner that exceeded specifications. Those gaps, he said, went unaddressed by the manufacturer 98.7 percent of the time in the cases he’d reviewed.
Mr. Salehpour also testified that, after voicing his concerns to Boeing, he suffered various forms of retaliation. The reprisals, he said, included his transfer to another program and being targeted with verbal abuse, threats, and a nail he believes was deliberately embedded in his tire.
“This nail was not picked up through normal driving,” Mr. Salehpour said he was told by an auto shop. While he said he thinks the nail was inserted when he was at work, he added that he has no proof of that.
Accountability
While Boeing has pledged to create an action plan to address safety concerns, Mr. Pierson said he believed continued investigation of the company was necessary. He added, though, that federal agencies should also be scrutinized for having become “lazy, complacent, and reactive” in their oversight responsibilities.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the committee’s top Republican, agreed that any investigation should examine where the government has “potentially dropped the ball” on aviation safety.
“This has to be a detailed investigation, and the end result has to be toward helping Boeing succeed by exposing the truth,” Mr. Johnson said.
Meanwhile, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the committee’s chairman, said he intended to hold additional hearings on Boeing and that he expected the company’s CEO, David Calhoun, to testify.
No Boeing representatives attended the hearing, though a spokesperson told The Associated Press that the company is cooperating with the senators’ inquiry and has offered to provide documents and briefings.
The hearing was the second the Senate held on Wednesday to examine Boeing’s safety culture. The first hearing, held by the Senate Commerce Committee, featured testimony from members of an expert panel that was appointed to review Boeing’s safety standards and procedures.
In a February report, the panel concluded there was a “disconnect” between Boeing management’s words on safety and what workers have observed in practice.
“They hear, ‘Safety is our number one priority.’ What they see is that’s only true as long as your production milestones are met, and at that point, it’s ‘Push it out the door as fast as you can,’” said MIT aeronautics lecturer Javier de Luis, who lost his sister in a Boeing 737 Max 8 crash in Ethiopia in 2019.
Mr. de Luis said that Boeing workers had also expressed “a very real fear of payback and retribution” if they spoke out.
The panel’s findings sparked bipartisan concern across the committee, with members noting the importance of aviation safety to all Americans.
“When each of us, when our families, when our children get on an airplane, we want to trust that we’re going to land safely,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said, asserting that Boeing needed to be held accountable.
He added, however, that the committee should not “rush to legislate just for the sake of legislating” but should explore other means of improving aviation safety “in a targeted and effective manner.”
Katabella Roberts and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
