Alaska Airlines staff inspect a Boeing 737 Max 9 door plug.
Ingrid Barrentine/Alaska Airlines
Two former Boeing employees told the LA Times they wouldn’t recommend flying on a 737 Max.”I saw the pressure employees were under to rush the planes out the door,” a former senior manager said.Both said Boeing’s culture values profit over quality, so there’s “a disaster waiting to happen.”
Two former Boeing staffers told the Los Angeles Times they wouldn’t fly on a 737 Max jet due to concerns over its safety.
“I would absolutely not fly a Max airplane,” Ed Pierson, a former senior manager at Boeing, told the Times.
“I’ve worked in the factory where they were built, and I saw the pressure employees were under to rush the planes out the door,” he added.
Boeing’s production line has come under increased scrutiny since 171 Max 9 jets were grounded following the Alaska Airlines blowout earlier this month.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the jet involved in that incident — delivered to Alaska Airlines just 66 days earlier — left the Boeing factory missing key bolts which were supposed to keep the door plug attached to the fuselage.
The manufacturer’s newest single-aisle jet first faced criticism after 346 people were killed in two crashes involving Max 8 jets, in 2018 and 2019.
A Boeing engineer previously told The New York Times the timeline for building the Max was “extremely compressed” as it raced to compete with the Airbus A320neo — which broke order records at the Paris Air Show in 2011.
Joe Jacobsen, a former engineer at Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, also told the newspaper he wouldn’t recommend flying on a Max jet — and said allowing the Max 9 to fly again was “premature.”
“I would tell my family to avoid the Max. I would tell everyone, really,” he said.
Jacobsen cited what he said is a culture at Boeing that values “financial engineering instead of technical engineering.”
Pierson agreed with this, telling the Times, “This is a culture where money is everything.”
“They measure success by how many airplanes are delivered, instead of how many quality airplanes are delivered,” he added. “When you factor all of this together, it’s just a disaster waiting to happen.”
Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, sent outside US working hours. It declined to comment to the Times on the staffers’ remarks.
