At a time when there's plenty of misinfo re 'cover ups' and voting 'corruption'..
This aircraft should never have been granted a permit to enter service and certainly after one crash should have been grounded
IF we thought this was just a design issue.. Working processes and quality control were scary. There may be planes up there that are accidents waiting to happen and not just 737 Max..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/jDOe2y9Tbo/boeing-737-max"Mr Pierson says he told the head of the 737 programme, Scott Campbell, that he had seen operations in the military shut down over less substantial safety issues.
“The military isn’t a profit-making organisation,” Mr Campbell allegedly replied.
Mr Pierson retired soon afterwards. But following the Lion Air crash he took his concerns back to Boeing, even writing directly to the chief executive and board – urging them to investigate conditions at Renton.
He was subsequently told the company had seen nothing “that would suggest the existence of embedded quality or safety issues”.
Boeing later said it had taken Mr Pierson’s concerns seriously, and had devoted significant resources to maintaining production quality. But it insisted that the suggestion of a link between production conditions at Renton and the two accidents was “completely unfounded”. It emphasised that none of the authorities investigating the crashes had found any such link.
Mr Pierson got a similar response when he took his concerns to the US National Transportation Safety Board, the US agency which was assisting with the investigation into ET302. Its response was that they fell “outside the scope of the NTSB’s role in the 737 Max investigations”.
But Mr Pierson says this misses the point. He still believes that conditions at Renton were highly relevant to the Max investigation, not least because, he claims, they showed a profit-driven corporate mentality at Boeing.
And he emphasises that the failure of sensors originally fitted in the factory were a major part of the chain of events leading to the crashes.
US lawmakers were shocked at his testimony – and ordered the FAA to investigate conditions at Renton. But while officials did subsequently speak to him, Mr Pierson insists they failed to follow-up on his allegations. Almost a year later, he feels deeply disappointed.
“I feel like they’re paid by tax dollars to do their job. But they resisted, they delayed, they blocked,” he says
“I’m not happy. I think all of us have been let down.”
The FAA says it has inspectors on site at Renton on a daily basis - a situation that predated Mr Pierson’s testimony. And it points out that for much of this year, the 737 Max production line was shut down after Boeing decided to suspend building the plane.
But Mr Pierson is not the only former Boeing employee to claim that production and cost pressures may have undermined safety standards at the company – and concerns are not confined to the 737 production line.
Boeing’s plant at North Charleston, South Carolina, makes the 787 Dreamliner, a popular long-haul airliner. John Barnett, a former quality control manager at the factory, has previously told the BBC he believes that a rush to get new planes out of the factory caused serious quality problems.
He claims, for example, that during his time at the plant, under-pressure workers deliberately removed substandard parts from scrap bins and fitted them to aircraft on the production line in order to save time – in at least one case with the knowledge of a senior manager.
He also alleges that procedures meant to track parts through the factory were not followed – allowing a number of defective items to be “lost”.
In 2017, following up on his claims, the FAA did identify a number of cases in which non-conforming parts had gone missing. Boeing insists that it has since fully resolved the situation and implemented corrective action."
