FAA had 'no presence' in Boeing's factory, despite its headquarters being 20 minutes away, former employee says

• Former Boeing staffer Ed Pierson told Politico that the FAA had "no presence" at his factory.
• Two Boeing 737 Max crashes occurred after Pierson quit in 2018.
• Safety concerns were reignited in January after a door plug fell off a Boeing 737 Max 9 mid-flight.

A Boeing whistleblower who quit over concerns about the company's 737 Max production told Politico that the FAA had "no presence" at the factory he worked in.

Ed Pierson was an employee at Boeing for a decade and was a senior manager at the company's production facility in Renton, Washington before quitting in August 2018.

Two months after Pierson's resignation, a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max crashed into the sea in October 2018, killing all 198 people on board.

Then, in March 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines flight using the same model of plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing a further 157 people.

Pierson said that he raised concerns about the production of the aircraft to Boeing, the FAA, and three government agencies before the crashes but was ignored by all of them, The New York Times and NBC News reported in 2019.

At the time, Boeing disputed that there was a connection between the production problems and the crashes.

The company faced backlash again in January of this year after a door plug on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 blew off mid-flight. No passengers or crew were harmed, and the door plug and two cellphones were later recovered.

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun told CNBC at the time that the Alaska Airlines blowout was caused by a "quality escape."

Calhoun said the company was looking at what was missed in the inspection process and "what broke down in the original work that allowed for that escape to happen."

The incident, however, reignited safety concerns over the aircraft, prompting Pierson to share issues he encountered as an employee.

In the interview with Politico, published on Monday, Pierson said there was a "chaotic disarray" type of environment and it "was so bad" when he worked there in 2018.

"We didn't have engines on many of the planes and so they put these big concrete blocks on the engine pylons so the plane wouldn't tip. Kind of an important part of the plane, right?" Pierson told the publication.

"And by the way, where the hell is the FAA? FAA had no presence in the factory. And it really irritates you because right down the road, literally 20 minutes down the road, is the Northwest headquarters for the FAA," he said.

"There's over 2,000 employees that work at that site and yet, in the busiest factory in the world 20 minutes down the road, there's four or five employees. That's not enough to monitor the restaurant operations at the site."

In his current role as executive director for the Foundation for Aviation Safety, Pierson has spoken to several media outlets about the issues he said he noticed while at Boeing.

The 737 Max was temporarily grounded in 2019 but was cleared to return to the air in 2020 after a safety review process involving several design changes was completed.

Pierson told Politico that he still feels unsafe on Boeing Max planes — so much so that he refuses to fly on them.

"Last year, I was flying from Seattle to New York, and I purposely scheduled myself on a non-Max airplane. I went to the gate. I walked in, sat down and looked straight ahead, and lo and behold, there was a 737-8/737-9 safety card. So I got up and I walked off," he said.

Following the Alaska Airlines incident in January, the company announced it had grounded 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets with a door plug, and the FFA launched an investigation into the company's manufacturing practices.

A spokesperson for the FAA told Business Insider that it has made "significant improvements" to its delegation and aircraft certification processes in recent years and that it took "immediate action" to address concerns after the Alaska Airlines incident.

"The FAA informed Boeing it will not grant any production expansion of the 737 MAX and is conducting enhanced oversight of Boeing and its suppliers," the spokesperson said.

"The agency is examining all aspects of Boeing's three manufacturing lines and Spirit AeroSystems' supplier activities. A dedicated team of approximately two dozen aviation safety inspectors is conducting these reviews at the Boeing 737 MAX facility in Renton, Washington, and at Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita, Kansas," they said.

They added that the reviews will cover production, employee training and qualifications, and supplier transfers.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Boeing told Politico that it has made several changes since the two deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019, including investing in more engineers and manufacturers and an official designee for employees to raise concerns.

It also increased its aerospace and safety expertise within its board of directors, the spokesperson said, although they didn't elaborate on what this involved.

Representatives for Pierson and Boeing did not immediately respond to requests for comment.