Two former Boeing executives said they wouldn't fly on the company's killer 737 Max plane after the latest safety fiasco – and one said he's urging his family not to set foot on one either.
“There's no way I would fly a Max plane,” Ed Pierson, a former Boeing executive, told the LA Times after the Jan. 5 incident in which a door plug fell out of a 737 Max 9 in mid-air Alaska Airlines flew out.
“I worked in the factory where they were built and saw the pressure the employees were under to get the planes out the door as quickly as possible,” he explained
Adding: “I tried to get them to shut down before the first crash.”
The return to service of the Max 9 is “another example of poor decision-making and endangers public safety,” Pierson told the publication.
Ed Pierson, a former Boeing executive, said he would “absolutely not fly a Max plane”
Joe Jacobsen, a former engineer at Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, expressed concern that the jets would return to the skies too soon and said he would urge his family not to set foot on a Boeing 737 Max
Joe Jacobsen, a former engineer at Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, agreed, telling the Times that it was “premature” to send the jets back into the sky.
“Instead of fixing one problem at a time and then waiting for the next one, fix them all,” Jacobsen said.
“I would advise my family to avoid the Max.” “I would tell everyone,” he said.
A faulty door plug release caused a panel on a Max 9 aircraft to come off at 16,000 feet on an Alaska Airlines flight on Jan. 5.
The Max 9s were temporarily grounded by aviation regulators for safety checks, but are now back in the air.
A photo shows the blown window. It is offered as a door on the plane. Alaska decided against this option, even though the frame of the future door was completely torn out by the hull damage
Alaska Flight 1282 took off from Portland shortly after 5 p.m. local time on Friday when, at 16,000 feet, a window shattered and ripped off a child's shirt
Other versions of the Boeing Max have also been at the center of safety scandals, including the Max 8, which suffered two crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.
The plane's computer system was to blame. Boeing has been accused of bolting engines that were too large to a 60-year-old airframe and then trying to fix the imbalance using software.
“Our long-term focus is on improving our quality so we can regain the trust of our customers, our regulator and the flying public,” Boeing Commercial Airplanes Chief Executive Stan Deal wrote in a message to employees Friday evening.
Adding: “Frankly, we disappointed and let them down.”
Jennifer Homendy of the National Transportation Safety Board said the explosion at 16,000 feet was an “accident, not an incident.”
The Boeing 737-9 MAX rolled off the assembly line just two months ago and received its certification in November 2023, according to FAA records posted online
“Each of our 737-9 MAX [planes] “Will not return to service until rigorous inspections are completed and each aircraft is deemed airworthy in accordance with FAA requirements,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement.
“Let me be clear: It will not be a return to normal for Boeing,” FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said in a statement last week.
“The quality assurance issues we have seen are unacceptable,” Whitaker said. “We will therefore be increasingly on site to closely examine and monitor production and manufacturing activities.”
The FAA also determined that it would not allow Boeing to expand production of its Max fleet, including the 737 Max 9.
Just weeks before the Alaska Airlines incident, Boeing asked the FAA to exempt the latest variant of its 737 Max plane from safety inspections despite the risk of engine failure.
FAA officials said Boeing is working to address the hazard, which could cause the engine casing to overheat and break off during flight, the Associated Press reported.
Meanwhile, federal officials asked pilots of the 737 Max 7, which is not yet used by airlines, to limit the use of an anti-icing system under certain conditions to avoid damage that “results in loss of control of the aircraft could”.
Boeing introduced its 737 Max 9 in 2015 and has become one of the most widely used aircraft in the world since receiving certification from the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) in 2017.
On March 11, 2019, the wreckage of the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX aircraft is spotted
But the company's reputation has been deeply tarnished and it has plunged Boeing into the biggest crisis in the history of the Chicago-headquartered company.
A year after it was put into service, the machine's first crash occurred: In October 2018, a 737 Max from the Indonesian airline Lion Air crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 189 passengers.
Five months later, in March 2019, a second 737 Max – this one operated by Ethiopian Airlines – crashed again shortly after takeoff, killing all 157 on board.
Three days later, the FAA grounded the planes.
It later emerged that Boeing employees in internal communications cavalierly criticized FAA regulations and criticized the Max's design — particularly a computer system that was blamed for both fatal crashes.
One said the plane was “designed by clowns who are in turn supervised by monkeys.”
The 737 design dates back to the 1960s and Boeing was criticized for putting large engines on an old airframe rather than using a “clean sheet design.”