Alaska Airlines employees inspect a Boeing 737 Max 9. Ingrid Barrentine/Alaska Airlines
Two former Boeing employees told the Los Angeles Times they would not recommend flying on a 737 Max.
“I saw the pressure employees were under to deliver the planes as quickly as possible,” said a former executive.
Both said Boeing’s corporate culture prioritizes profit over quality, so “disaster is inevitable.”
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by an editor.
Two former Boeing employees told the „Los Angeles Times“that they would not fly on a 737 Max jet due to safety concerns. “There is no way I would fly a Max plane,” Ed Pierson, a former Boeing executive, told the Times. “I worked in the factory where they were built and I saw the pressure the employees were under to deliver the planes as quickly as possible.”
Boeing’s production line has come under increased scrutiny since 171 Max 9 jets were grounded following the Alaska Airlines mishap earlier this month. As the Wall Street Journal reported, The aircraft was missing the key bolts that are responsible for attaching the door stopper to the fuselage. The aircraft had only left the Boeing factory 66 days earlier and was then delivered to Alaska Airlines.
Boeing has had a series of deadly mishaps in recent years
The manufacturer’s latest single-aisle jet first came under criticism after two Max 8 jet crashes in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people. A Boeing engineer told the New York Times at the timethe schedule for building the Max was “extremely compressed” because it wanted to compete with the Airbus A320neo, which set an order record at the 2011 Paris Air Show.
Joe Jacobsen, a former engineer at Boeing and the US Federal Aviation Administration, also told the newspaper that he would not recommend flying on a Max jet – and that it would be “premature” to let the Max 9 fly again. “I would advise my family to avoid Max. I would really recommend that to anyone,” he said.
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Jacobsen pointed to what he said was a culture at Boeing that valued “financial engineering over technical engineering.” Pierson agreed, telling the Los Angeles Times that money is everything in Boeing’s corporate culture. “They measure success by how many aircraft are delivered, not by how many high-quality aircraft are delivered. When you add it all up, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
The company declined to comment to the Los Angeles Times about the employees’ comments.
Read the original article in English here.