😎 See if this doesn't sound familiar [link to entire article]:
From Politico 2/24/2024: In 2018, Ed Pierson decided that he could no longer work as a senior manager for Boeing’s 737 MAX program.
"At the company’s production facility in Renton, Washington, he had watched as employee morale plummeted and oversight and assembly procedures faltered. ... then fatal MAX 8 crashes occurred in 2018 and 2019. Five years later, after a door plug blew off of a 737 MAX 9 in the middle of an Alaska Airlines flight last month, Pierson is again trying to sound the alarm.
I have always had the greatest respect for the airplane products that The Boeing Company makes. I had no reason ever to doubt it. And then I started working in the factory. I had been around airplanes my whole career. I flew airplanes in the Navy. You go into the production environment, and you’re like, “Oh, my God, I had no idea it was this complex.” It’s stunning how complex it is. At first, I didn’t understand how all that came together. And it gave me a great respect for the people that were building the plane — it’s incredibly impressive to see. And then everything started to change in 2017 and into 2018.
I realized how the leadership was treating employees — very disrespectfully, very embarrassing. Standing up in front of teams and just calling them out, and it was horrendous. I thought, this is not a healthy environment to build airplanes. I can’t support this as a senior manager. I just felt this was really wrong
The leadership doesn’t get down there and get involved with the people that are building the products. They don’t value the engineers, they think the engineers are replaceable. You can’t take a 20- or 30-year employee and just dump them off to the side and think that you’re going to find somebody off the street that’s going to be able to do what that person does.
Boeing’s board of directors — they have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that their products are safe, and they’re not in touch. They’re not engaged. They don’t visit the sites. They don’t talk to the employees. They’re not on the ground floor.
But one thing’s for sure: Continuing to fly them, completely disregarding the root causes of these problems, not admitting that these problems exist ... — none of that’s going to make anybody safe."
Ed Pierson: ‘I’m Not Trying to Cause a Scene. I Just Want to Get Off This Plane.’... Amen!
