Retired Boeing Manager Will Testify on 737 Max Production Fears
Retired Boeing Manager Will Testify on 737 Max Production Fears
(Bloomberg) -- A former Boeing Co. manager who raised concerns about poor-quality production of the 737 Max will testify Wednesday before a House committee investigating safety issues raised by two fatal crashes involving the plane.
Ed Pierson warned senior Boeing colleagues in 2018 about what he said were overworked employees and repeated quality issues in building the newest model of 737s.
Pierson has been added to the witness list for Wednesday’s hearing by the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee. He will be joined on the panel by retired Federal Aviation Administration official G. Michael Collins as well as Mica Endsley, a retired Air Force chief scientist and an expert on human factors; and John Cox, a former 737 pilot who is president of the aviation consulting company Safety Operating Systems.
FAA Administrator Steve Dickson and two other agency officials will appear in an earlier panel before the committee. It’s Dickson’s first appearance there since he was sworn in as head of the agency in August.
In an Oct. 30 hearing by the committee, Boeing President Dennis Muilenburg was grilled on Pierson’s concerns.
In one email to Boeing’s general manager for the 737 Max program, Pierson said factory workers were fatigued and that pressure to maintain production schedules was causing employees to cut corners. He recommended halting production of the jet, according to portions of the email read aloud by Representative Albio Sires, a New Jersey Democrat.
While Pierson wasn’t named at the hearing, he authored the email, a person familiar with the matter said. Sires referred to him as a senior manager on the 737 Max’s final assembly team.
Pierson brought up his concerns before and after the crashes of two 737 Max jetliners, off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia, said company spokesman Gordon Johndroe in an emailed statement.
“Company executives and senior leaders on the 737 program were made aware of Mr. Pierson’s concerns, discussed them in detail, and took appropriate steps to assess them,” the company said in the statement.
Boeing disputed Pierson’s suggestion that the production issues were linked to the crashes. The accidents occurred after a flight control system on the planes malfunctioned and repeatedly drove down the nose until pilots lost control.
“Mr. Pierson raises issues about the production of the 737 MAX, yet none of the authorities investigating these accidents have found that production conditions in the 737 factory contributed in any way to these accidents,” the company said.
Production issues weren’t raised among numerous contributing factors by the Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee in its final report on the October 2018 crash of a Lion Air flight in the Java Sea. A report on the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March has yet to be completed.
--With assistance from Courtney Rozen.
To contact the reporters on this story: Alan Levin in Washington at alevin24@bloomberg.net;Ryan Beene in Washington at rbeene@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jon Morgan at jmorgan97@bloomberg.net, John Harney
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