The Worst 7 Years in Boeing’s History—and the Man Who Won’t Stop Fighting for Answers
Fatal crashes. A door blowout. Grounded planes. Inside the citizen-led, obsessive campaign to hold Boeing accountable and prevent the next disaster.
On a sticky hot morning in July, Ed Pierson steps into the lobby of a hotel in Washington, DC, completely unwilling to obey the plane-crash life cycle. You’ve seen it: An awful crash dominates the news. The loss of lives is so vastly unjust. Serious investigators look into the causes and issue a report. Regulators and lawmakers hatch reforms. Passengers start to forget. Most of us get back on the plane.
Pierson—a strapping 62-year-old with a shaved head and rocket-launch levels of energy—does not accept any of it. Instead, he is executing the Ed Pierson plan. He perches on a couch in this lobby, to explain the day’s play:
Pierson will walk into a series of federal buildings without an appointment. In front of the security guards (with his wife and me alongside), he will announce that he is a Boeing whistleblower. He’ll spare the guards the very long, personal story of guilt, obsession, and sacrifice that led him here. He won’t have much time to say that, for years, he’s been talking with these agencies about Boeing’s 737 Max. But he’ll explain that the manila envelope he’s pulling from his backpack, the bag embroidered with a little football and a B for Bainbridge High School, holds internal Boeing documents that he wants to deliver right now—in person—to a top dog in the building.
As often happens when Pierson gets going, we need to back up. Boeing has had a hellacious stretch. In 2018, a Boeing Max dove into the sea. Four months later, a Max crashed into a field. After that came the fact-finding about design flaws; criminal charges for corporate fraud; lawsuits and settlements for 346 people killed. As those events faded from memory, a door then blew off of an Alaska Airlines flight over Portland, Oregon; passengers filmed the open patch of sky. Boeing was back in the spotlight, bashed by everyone from John Oliver to Josh Hawley. A Boeing whistleblower took his own life next to a profane note about management. A whistleblower from a supplier died weeks later of a bacterial infection, sending conspiracists chattering. Then came more grillings before Congress, and the specter of junk-bond status—junk status for Boeing, king of the jet age.
Before all of it, Ed Pierson: a senior manager in the Max factory near Seattle. That’s why some people in DC listen to him. People also listen because Pierson will not—metaphorically and very literally—stop talking.
Pierson talks about Boeing’s failings on CNN and Fox and CNBC. He’s discussed Boeing before Congress—twice—and with congressional staffers. (“There’s never quite a short conversation with Ed,” says a former one.) Pierson has Zoomed with the former head of the Federal Aviation Administration. He’s buttonholed a Max crash investigator in the aisle at a hearing. He talks on his own podcast, via his slick website EdPierson.com. He talks to Michelle, his monumentally supportive wife, who warns him that if their friends ask about Boeing at dinner, Pierson can reply, but Pierson cannot be the one to bring Boeing up.
Pierson is no doubt a hopeful man, exuding bullish, earnest energy—coach energy. At times, he tells me, “You’ve got me all fired up!” when I’ve been silently typing notes. So yes, right now, he is heading straight to the offices of some of the most powerful people in the US. Pierson believes the documents in his backpack show the company was never—is still not—completely honest about the Max crashes. (Boeing does not agree.) He worries deeply about the Maxes still flying, saying unnerving things like, “God forbid another crash occurs.” (Boeing shoots back that it has full confidence in the Max’s safety; the planes carry 700,000 passengers a day.)
Pierson and Boeing have long settled into a David-and-Goliath antagonism, perhaps intensified by having once known—even respected—each other up close. This morning in DC, however, Pierson is convinced he finally has the receipts to make an overwhelming case. He’d explain more, but at the moment, it’s time to move. Pierson walks out the hotel door. He strides south toward the brutalist behemoth at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue: home of the FBI.
“I’m mentally prepared for rejection,” he explains en route. This is not Pierson’s typical mode, as a former Naval commanding officer, a Division-1 football player, son of a cop—an American big guy with Big Guy Confidence. But he hasn’t had time to set up meetings. No gravitas gained by his tourist’s polo shirt and jeans in a citadel of suits. His wife, Michelle, advises him to take off his baseball cap before opening the FBI’s door. He pushes it open, all of us curious how the first stop will go.
In a word: disastrously.
Pierson walks up to the counter, sets his backpack on the ledge, and as he unzips it, says to the man behind the window, a tad jumpily, “If you don’t mind, I’m just gonna take out the package. It’s just an envelope for FBI director Wray. Is that OK?” The man calls a 270-pound tank from security. That man makes Pierson step outside and stand back several feet. The guard takes a tactical position—back to the wall, sight lines on Pierson, Michelle, and me. He tells Pierson that the FBI can’t accept evidence this way.
Once the guard leaves, Pierson grouses, “I hate being put in that box of ‘He’s a potential loo-loo, crazy person.’”
The next drop, at the Department of Justice a half block away, doesn’t go much better. A pair of wary guards transmit a Suuuuure you know someone skepticism while Pierson leaves a voicemail for the fraud division head on the Boeing case. One guard lingers by the door of our Uber until it pulls away.
Zero for two.
Pierson dials more numbers as we drive to the next target. Now he’s getting somewhere. The FAA sends down a runner—“Mr. Pierson?”—to grab his envelope in the lobby. The mail guy at the National Transportation Safety Board promises to get the documents to the chair. The fraud chief at the DOJ calls back and directs Pierson to another building.
Ed Pierson, radiating coach energy, wants Boeing to fix its factory culture.
In the lobby of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Pierson gets back on the phone, dialing a glut of numbers off the website. Pretty soon its general counsel appears and takes the envelope. A Department of Transportation contact meets Pierson at a Starbucks for the drop, tense that a journalist is in tow. Two staffers from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has been grilling Boeing since the Alaska Airlines door blowout, accept the envelope in the bowels of an office building. Traipsing down the hallway, Pierson whispers, “I think the committee staff think I’m kind of obsessive.”
What’s not clear from this one-man mission is that Pierson sits at a hub of Boeing dissent. He’s become a trusted counsel to the families of Max crash victims. His podcast, Warning Bells, is now a way station for the company’s critics, almost all of whom want Boeing to get back to its old self. He has formalized a group of experts into a foundation that parses technical reports and blasts out pugnacious letters to US agencies. Other Boeing whistleblowers have reached out in search of a sympathetic ear. Some leak new information, like these very documents he is dropping around DC.
Thousands of feet above, across the globe, more than 1,700 Max airplanes crisscross the sky, and Pierson constantly reads the malfunction reports still coming in from airlines. He worries it all bodes badly.
“When that door blew off,” a Max pilot says, “I remember talking to Ed and saying, brother, you’ve been affirmed.”
Pierson started his career at Boeing in 2008, with jobs in fleet services and the test flight division. In 2015 he moved to the company’s factory in Renton, on the lip of glittering Lake Washington, where he oversaw managers of engineers working on assembly-line efficiencies and also managers of “shipside” teams that coordinated fixes on the floor. Pierson took in the humongous line of 737s, the company’s longtime workhorse—“a kid in a candy store,” as he put it, awed by the manufacturing ballet. At the time, Boeing was pushing out the first test planes for the 737 Max.
The Max was infamously rushed from the start. Boeing’s archrival, Airbus, had released a more fuel-efficient model, a huge draw for airlines. Boeing executives decided they’d quickly modify the 737 to compete. The new version became the fastest-selling plane in Boeing history. By 2017, as Max production ramped up, executives called on the Renton 737 program to push out an unprecedented 47 planes a month.
By the end of the year, Pierson says, he was troubleshooting the aviation version of the I Love Lucy chocolate factory speedup: “It was chaos.” Suppliers were behind on delivering parts. On the factory floor, Pierson saw workers installing components out of the prescribed sequence. People were required to do overtime, weekend after weekend. Old-timers told Pierson this was the worst they’d ever seen: Pierson recalls that workers were logging over 30 percent more quality issues.
As 2017 turned into 2018, Pierson trudged home each night after work to his quiet house deep in Boeing country, bone tired and increasingly worried. Where was the tipping point from a chaotic factory to a dangerous one? (Boeing says its factory conditions did not affect airplane safety.)
Miserable and fearful, Pierson was thinking about retiring early and finding another job. He was in his mid-fifties. In June 2018, the factory was again told to speed up production, to 52 planes a month. Pierson lost his parking spot: Unfinished 737s, including Maxes, filled the factory lots as they waited for parts to come in. One Saturday, headed in for weekend work, Pierson blazed up I-405 at dawn. He missed his exit. If I’m making blunders, how mistake-prone are the rushed workers grinding out months of physical labor?
A 737 Max in production near Boeing’s factory in Renton, Washington.
Pierson decided to go straight to the top. He typed out an email to the head of the 737 program, Scott Campbell. He wrote about the 38 planes waiting for parts and the exhausted employees: “Frankly right now all my internal warning bells are going off. And for the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane.” He asked Campbell to shut down the production line until they could finish the planes parked outside. (Campbell, since retired, didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Campbell thanked him for his “great insight,” adding that he would remind leadership that safety came first. The next month, Pierson, having seen factory statistics only get worse, walked into Campbell’s office and again raised his concerns—the parts delays, a lack of quality inspectors, electronic and electrical tests failing. He again demanded the line be shut down. “We can’t do that,” he remembers Campbell saying. “I can’t do that.” Pierson responded that in the military, they’d shut down missions for lesser safety concerns. He says Campbell replied: “The military isn’t a profit-making organization.”
A couple weeks later, in August, Pierson retired (“abandoning the Titanic,” he’d later say). Dozens of employees penned you’ll-be-missed messages around photos of Boeing planes. One coworker with whom he’d traded worries added, “I am sure that you will be happy to leave this place.”
In late October 2018, he sat in his family room, studying football videos on his laptop, when he overheard a headline on TV. Plane crash in the Java Sea. Lion Air. All 189 passengers and crew killed. A two-month-old Boeing 737 Max 8.
Michelle walked in. Stunned, Pierson said, “Honey, this is a brand-new plane. I was there when it was being made.”
Pierson started searching, fervidly, for news. Images of gnarled plane parts being fished from the sea made him sick. One image, of shoes lined up on a pier, yanked him from sleep: tiny red slippers with Velcro—children’s shoes. His horror and anger built for days, then weeks. The news reports highlighted Lion Air’s checkered safety record and potential problems with the plane itself. The company assured the world the Max was “as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies.”
A month after the crash, the Indonesian government released a preliminary report. Pierson printed out all 78 pages and devoured it on a flight (not a Max; he vows to never fly in one). The report included a Boeing bulletin to pilots about how a faulty sensor could trigger the plane’s nose to repeatedly point down. No mention of the factory. Pierson felt he had to draw the investigators’ attention to the assembly line.
That December, “naive enough to think they’d want to talk to me,” he mailed a letter directly to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg; he wanted to get in touch with the company’s lead on the Indonesian investigation. He wrote: “Admittedly the information I need to share isn’t favorable to Boeing, but I believe it is very important nonetheless.”
The response came from the company’s lawyers: first, phone calls asking about his concerns, and then in February, an email saying senior leaders had looked through them: “We have seen nothing … that would suggest the existence of embedded quality or safety issues.” Pierson replied bluntly, “I don’t think this is a sufficient response.” He wrote to the board of directors. He didn’t want to “wake up one morning and hear about another tragedy and have personal regrets.” That was February 19, 2019.
Before dawn on March 10, Michelle was startled awake, as Pierson, who had been thumbing through news on his phone, roared, “FUUUCK!!”
Ethiopian Airlines’ ET302, on a four-month old Max, had plowed into a field outside Addis Ababa at 575 miles per hour. All 157 people aboard were killed. Within days, regulators around the globe grounded all Maxes—more than 350 of them. The US House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure launched an investigation and urged Boeing employees to contact them with information.
Pierson typed out a message.
Until then, his agitating had taken place behind corporate doors. Now he hired an attorney. Over the next weeks and months, Pierson told a slew of federal agencies what he’d witnessed at the Boeing factory. Investigators from the House Transportation Committee reached out to talk, and by fall, they wanted Pierson to testify at a public hearing. Doug Pasternak, the lead investigator, saw Pierson as “the poster boy of whistleblowers”—unimpeachable résumé, meticulous documentation, a keen sense of moral duty. “Ed was the only one,” Pasternak says, “where we had evidence that he was screaming from the rooftops to senior management.”
Pierson understood his presence on Capitol Hill would make an impact—and bring a new level of scrutiny. So he and Michelle phoned each of their kids, who were now in their twenties and thirties: This would be Dad’s face on national TV, speaking damningly about a powerful company. What did they think? They all replied, Do it.
Quickly, journalists caught wind of the Boeing insider about to go public. Pierson spoke with The New York Times. A documentary crew flew with him and Michelle to DC, filming Pierson’s brooding and Michelle’s face masked in worry. In DC, he sat before NBC’s crew: “I’m mad at myself, because I felt maybe I could have done more.”
In the hearing room at the Rayburn congressional building on Capitol Hill, Pierson sat behind a microphone. His voice had the haunted tone of a eulogy. He laid out his history of raising concerns while on the job and after the first crash, and asked for the factory conditions to be investigated. In the gallery, among the parents, sons, and daughters of crash victims, a man from Toronto named Chris Moore held a photo of his 24-year-old daughter, Danielle, who had been killed in the Ethiopian crash. Listening, Moore thought here, finally, a guy with the moxie to raise safety issues before the disasters—and it was the first he’d heard about Renton as a potential factor. After the hearing, the mother of another victim hugged Pierson, telling him, “That took courage.”
“Why is she hugging me?” Pierson wondered. “I worked for the company that built these damn planes.”
The Piersons flew back home. “I hoped,” Michelle says, “that now that he’d given his stuff to Congress, it would be done. He could be free of it.”
Instead, Pierson burrowed in.
In the news, Boeing’s spokesperson gave Pierson a pat on the head: He “did the right thing” and the company “took appropriate steps” to address his concerns. But the spokesperson said that Pierson’s allegations were “completely unfounded” and that no investigator had linked the crashes to factory issues.
At this point, it was widely reported that the cause of the crashes was a series of events triggered by faulty angle-of-attack sensors. Mounted on the plane’s nose, these sensors calculated the angle of the wings to the oncoming air. The devices were made by another aerospace company, and Boeing workers normally installed and tested them in Renton. Each Max had two sensors, but Boeing designed the system so that only one sensor fed data into the flight control computer at a time. In the minutes leading up to both crashes, that lone sensor had failed; it gave the pilots a false reading that the plane was angling sharply upward. That reading repeatedly triggered a software system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System. To prevent the plane from stalling if it were actually angled dangerously upward, MCAS automatically pitched the plane’s nose down. Pilots on both flights fought the automatic system in a chaotic tug of war before finally losing control.
“From day one in aerospace engineering undergraduate classes,” says MIT aeronautics lecturer Javier de Luis, who lost his sister Graziella in the Ethiopian crash, “we tell kids you cannot have single points of failures in systems that can take down an airplane.” Having one sensor transmitting data into MCAS created a single point of failure.
Boeing also hadn’t been fully transparent about MCAS with regulators and didn’t tell pilots of its existence. The FAA requires that critical software like MCAS undergo more vetting and that airlines potentially do more pilot training. Journalists and investigators roundly dissected how Boeing downplayed MCAS to the FAA and marketed the Max as needing minimal training for pilots of other 737 models.
Pierson fixated on why the sensors, lost in the wreckage, had failed. The day before the Lion Air flight, mechanics in Indonesia had replaced one faulty angle-of-attack sensor with another, refurbished one. In the final crash report from Indonesia, the authors blamed the refurbished sensor’s failure on a Florida repair shop. The shop, they wrote, had miscalibrated it by 21 degrees. The FAA revoked the Florida shop’s certification to repair airplane parts.
As for the Ethiopian plane, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and its French counterparts, who’d gotten involved in the investigation, attributed the sensor’s malfunction to it getting physically walloped. Most likely by a bird. (In fact, these sensors have failed after being frozen, installed incorrectly, hit by lightning, or, yes, whammed by birds.) The Ethiopian investigators, however, were skeptical from the beginning. They would eventually report that they hadn’t found any bird carcasses. (American investigators argued that the Ethiopians took more than a week to check for bird evidence.)
Pierson accepted that the sensors had failed. It was the “why?” that bothered him. He couldn’t shake his sense that there was more to the story.
In early 2020, as Covid clobbered the airlines, the media’s glare on his congressional testimony dimmed and Pierson bought an RV. His hope was to road-trip to Texas to see his grandkids. He never made it, but he did park the RV at his in-laws’ farm nearby and practically moved in. For up to 12 hours a day, Pierson sat at the RV’s kitchenette table, combing through crash reports, news stories, electrical engineering tomes. He etched notes and Ohm’s law into a giant artist sketchbook; he plugged any mention of the Max’s sensors into an Excel spreadsheet.
Surveying his mess of papers, Pierson’s thoughts swerved to his dad back in the day, always mulling his latest whodunit. His father had died more than a decade prior. But there in the RV, in the silence of the Covid summer, Pierson felt close to him. He thought about something his dad always said: People lie; follow the evidence.
By September, Pierson was stewing. The FAA was getting close to putting the Max back in the sky. Boeing was settling lawsuits with the Lion Air victims’ families, and it had changed its problematic software. The head of the FAA touted the agency’s recertification work and piloted a test flight himself.
That month, the House Transportation Committee finally released its 245-page Max report. It outlined how Boeing obscured information about the software from pilots; it criticized the FAA for failing to act after the first crash. Pierson’s name appeared 132 times—an “incredibly important” source, the committee wrote, who painted “a deeply troubling picture of Boeing’s production first, safety second, culture among Boeing’s senior leadership.”
In his RV, Pierson plowed ahead. He reread the 322-page final report from Indonesia and an interim report from Ethiopia. He focused on something that was nearly absent from the public narrative: The new planes had maintenance problems, including likely electrical issues. The Lion Air plane had a tripped circuit breaker and a flurry of fault messages, one of which prescribed wiring checks. On the Ethiopian plane, the auxiliary power unit had malfunctioned, and the captain’s computer outlet never worked. The altimeter and vertical speed indicator were giving erratic readings. Dramatically, while on autopilot in the months before the crash, the plane rolled to the side unprompted.
“You sons of bitches,” Pierson remembers thinking, “this information should have been pursued.”
As he scrutinized the Indonesian report, nuances emerged. Investigators first suggested the possibility that the Florida shop miscalibrated the sensor; they could have inadvertently introduced a 21-degree error. As Pierson read, he noticed that in other parts of the report, the idea hardened into firm fact.
Then something deep in the report grabbed his interest. Several months after the crash, investigators from the NTSB, Boeing, the FAA, and the sensor manufacturer examined the old sensor from the Lion Air plane, the one that had been replaced the day before the crash. That sensor had signs of electrical damage, including a broken wire and an intermittent open circuit.
Pierson got in touch with an aerospace engineering professor named Daniel Ossmann at the Munich University of Applied Sciences, an expert on detecting faults in airplane sensors, and peppered him with technical questions on a series of Zooms.
Pierson settled on a theory. Maybe the sensor wasn’t hit by a bird in Ethiopia, and the Lion Air Max’s sensor wasn’t a lemon. Maybe a malfunction in the plane’s electrical infrastructure made them lemons, such that they gave bad readings. Or the reverse: A damaged sensor somehow hurt the electrical system.
He wrote a report, called “Still Not Fixed,” and sent it off to Ossmann and other aviation experts for feedback. In January 2021, he posted it on a vintage-looking website he’d hastily built on GoDaddy. With meticulous footnotes and links, Pierson outlined new lines of inquiry about the electrical system, the miles of wires that form the plane’s nerve system. He noted that he saw electrical defects getting detected and reworked at the Max factory.
Pierson was taking a firm step away from government findings, and, at that point, doing it alone: US authorities stuck to miscalibration and a bird strike to explain the sensor failures. Boeing, citing those authorities, told WIRED, “As we said in 2019, Mr. Pierson’s theory is wrong.” Pierson argues that he “never claimed that I know everything about what could have happened electrically.” What he wants is a more detailed investigation.
Pierson sent his treatise to journalists who had covered the Max debacle, hoping for another blast of press.
The BBC did a story, quoting a plane safety expert who cautioned that interpreting the crash reports doesn’t constitute a new investigation. But most reporters had moved on. Earlier that month, the Department of Justice charged Boeing for conspiracy to defraud the FAA about its MCAS software. At the same time, the DOJ announced that the case was being settled: Boeing agreed to ramped-up federal oversight, a $243.6 million penalty (roughly the sticker price of a wide-body Boeing airplane around that time), and $1.77 billion paid to airlines for lost revenue. Boeing would also pay $500 million to victims’ families.
The government wrote, “Misconduct was neither pervasive across the organization, nor undertaken by a large number of employees, nor facilitated by senior management.” Boeing touted its Max changes; global regulators deemed it safe to fly. And Pierson went back to his RV, restless.
Pierson had spent his life contributing to institutions. At his most senior post in the Navy, he’d coordinated operations for 350,000 military personnel. Now he’d even quit coaching football to focus on Boeing. He and Michelle lived off of his military and Boeing retirement pay and their investments. He’d sold all but a few Boeing shares, keeping those to spy on shareholder meetings. He had become a lone wolf—or worse, a gadfly. The only people who listened to him were his kids, Navy and football buddies, and, always, Michelle.
Pierson sent his report to a Senate committee working on aviation reforms, which interviewed him and attached his treatise to its aviation safety whistleblowers report. In backchannel conversations, some people found Pierson’s ideas plausible; others dismissed them. “Of course we listened to him,” says one person close to the Senate investigation, “but it was hard to validate that production was the cause of the Max crashes.” Over at the NTSB, leaders would send him three letters saying that the evidence didn’t point to the factories. “He just kept on going,” says a former NTSB investigator. “He’s a bit of a one-trick pony.”
Pierson wasn’t only upset about losing momentum. As his phone went quiet and people again boarded Maxes around the world, Pierson felt lonely.
Nadia Milleron’s daughter, Samya Stumo, had been 24, bright, altruistic, with “a spreadsheet for every occasion.” She lived in DC and was traveling to East Africa to set up an office for the health-focused nonprofit where she worked, telling Milleron over the phone before she left, “It’s just two weeks, Mom.” After the crash, Milleron experienced cascading effects of trauma. Sometimes she felt like she couldn’t feel her feet while walking—as if “paddling through the air” of her Massachusetts farmhouse. She’d set a timer to measure how long she was scrubbing dishes. She’d count aloud while making tea, while driving, to keep herself tethered to time. One night, she looked through the catalog of items collected from the crash debris, and she saw Samya’s blue skirt. When it arrived, it smelled like jet fuel.
The factory “chaos” led Pierson to retire early.
Milleron found some purpose in agitating for reforms, especially with other families. Another of those agitators was Chris Moore, a retiree in Canada. Signing in to Zoom, Moore recognized Pierson from that congressional hearing two years prior, in which he’d listened from the gallery while holding a photo of his daughter, Danielle. She had been a climate activist and taught kids to code. She used to bike through the Manitoban winter and tweet out selfies of the icicles on her eyelashes. Hours before the crash, she posted: “I’m so excited to share that I’ve been selected to attend and am currently en route to the @UNEnvironment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya.” Every evening at 6 pm, Moore and his wife, Clariss, light a candle while they cook dinner. He still uses the email address Danielle made for him in seventh grade—“dadthedude.” He thought, often, that if he couldn’t wish Danielle off the plane, he wished himself onto it, to hold her hand through the horror. “Why my daughter? Why did it have to be her?”
Pierson—dad of five, granddad of three so far—took in the handful of faces on the Zoom grid. He expressed his sorrow for their losses and said he had information to share. The families welcomed him. From that point on, Pierson answered or researched their questions and joined their regular calls. Could Pierson sometimes go a little long on his passionate jags? Sure, “but those are style things,” Milleron says. “I see Ed as a key. As a clue.” Moore calls Pierson “your typical GI Joe,” a trustworthy wingman with a reassuring refusal to fear a corporate titan. And Pierson, “he probably feels that his sails are full from us, because we believe in him. We agree with him.” (For Moore, that includes supporting Pierson’s electrical theory.) In his loneliest year, Pierson had found another group that had very much not moved on.
At his retirement from Boeing, colleagues wrote well wishes on a photo of a plane.
As Pierson plunged forward in his research, he only grew more anxious. Earlier in 2021, Boeing had temporarily grounded more than 60 Maxes for a new electrical problem. At one point, Pierson had called up a manager who had reported to him in Renton. The manager told Pierson that both the Ethiopian and Indonesian planes showed hydraulic, electronic, and electrical problems during manufacturing, and that employees had logged requests for assistance with those issues into Shipside Action Tracker records. The problems were supposedly fixed before the planes went into service. Pierson asked to see them—“I told Michelle, we’d mortgage the house to get those SAT records”—but the manager said he didn’t save copies.
Pierson was buoyed by a development at the end of 2022: The Ethiopians released their final crash report. Pierson had reached out to them amid their investigation and sat for more than a dozen interviews. At one point, he even sent them questions to ask the NTSB. Now the final report was almost exactly aligned with his theory. Citing the plane’s electrical abnormalities in the weeks before the crash, the report claimed that electrical defects from the plane’s manufacturing caused the sensor to fail—not only in the crash they were investigating but in the Lion Air crash too.
The NTSB and the French safety agency quickly shot the report down, a rare disagreement between international aviation authorities. They repeated the bird-strike theory; the French even claimed an object hitting the sensor was “the only possible scenario.” The NTSB criticized the Ethiopians for not examining the pilots’ performance. Some cautioned, again, that the real problem was that Boeing designed a system with a single point of failure that—whatever its cause—could take down planes.
Pierson, of course, remained firmly on the side of the Ethiopians, but his focus had widened to the Maxes in the air, the ones built alongside the doomed planes and since. And he was no longer alone.
Another whistleblower, Joe Jacobsen, had joined the family calls. Also in his sixties, Jacobsen had retired from the FAA in 2021, disillusioned with what he says was the agency’s kowtowing to Boeing. As a safety engineer, he’d been in an FAA meeting where Boeing engineers presented the idea of the bird strike, and he’d immediately had doubts. (Among the reasons for his skepticism: In the plane’s recovered cockpit recorder, there was no thump or verbal acknowledgment from the pilots that they’d hit a bird.)
Jacobsen and Pierson started poring over information together—including a 343-page Boeing bulletin from 2020 that prescribed changes to a specific Max electrical system to comply with regulations. They kept a list of Boeing’s petitions to the FAA for exemptions from design safety standards. They eyed new problems on Maxes that were being logged in two arcane federal databases: Switches that didn’t work. Airspeed indicators that didn’t agree. Emergency landings that never made the news.
Tired of courting the media for attention, Pierson started his own podcast, Warning Bells. On a couple episodes, Pierson mentioned that a single airline, Alaska, was reporting more problems with the Max than others. All Maxes come off the same assembly line, so he didn’t think it made sense for Alaska to have more issues. He figured that the company was simply more diligently reporting them. In the spring of 2023, he FedEx-ed a letter to an Alaska Airlines PO box, addressed to the CEO, in which he recommended that Alaska ground the planes. (The airline says it never got the letter.) After Pierson put out a press release on the issue that fall, the reports from Alaska sharply fell off—from more than 90 a month to a trickle. Alaska says that it changed its reporting “to the industry standard,” logging certain types of incidents to the FAA internally rather than in the public logs Pierson looked at.
By now, Pierson had formed a tight group to compare notes with, including some Navy buddies and a pilot’s union spokesman who flew Maxes and had publicly criticized Boeing. Plus Jacobsen and another retired FAA whistleblower, Mike Dostert, who had warned his managers about the risks of “loving Boeing to death.”
That summer Pierson pitched them all an idea: How about joining up as an independent watchdog of Maxes and other planes? An expert “fighting force,” Pierson says. The group set up a nonprofit. A friend—another football coach—put up a sharp website: the Foundation for Aviation Safety. They issued a first press release about faulty electrical bonding on Maxes. It didn’t exactly grab headlines.
On the other hand, a door flying off a plane does.
Pierson and Jacobsen were sitting on the bleachers in a school gym in January 2024 when Pierson’s phone buzzed with texts and news. A door plug had ripped out of a new Max mid-flight, high above the city of Portland; passengers strapped on oxygen masks. Alaska Airlines.
Jacobsen turned to Pierson to say, “I think we’re about to get busy.”
Suddenly, many of the moves Pierson had wanted started to happen. The FAA grounded Max 9’s—the larger model, like the one that had lost a door—and the NTSB marched into the Renton factory.
Within a month, they announced that Boeing workers hadn’t installed four bolts that hold the door panel. Inspections of other grounded Max 9’s turned up loose bolts. The FAA and US senators started talking about a “systemic issue” with Boeing’s manufacturing. The FAA gave the company 90 days to fix its quality control.
Pierson’s daughter on Facebook: “Wow, it’s almost like someone has been screaming to deaf ears for 5 YEARS about production issues?” To me, Michelle snuffed any notion that her husband would gloat: “Do you want to be right about that? He was just grateful that the whole plane didn’t go down.” Even one of Pierson’s critics, a former NTSB investigator, conceded that on this one, “Yep, that’s a manufacturing quality-control, safety-culture problem, and Ed Pierson got that right.”
Pierson was once again, for the first time in years, flooded with media requests. Four days after the blowout, he spotted an email from John Barnett. He recognized the name: Barnett was a former Boeing quality manager who had spoken up inside the company and to regulators about alleged shortcuts at Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner factory in South Carolina. He’d been locked in a yearslong legal battle with Boeing over alleged retaliation. He now told Pierson he’d seen him on the news and was interested in working with his foundation. Pierson liked the idea of Barnett joining. Figuring they’d probably talk for a long time once things calmed down, he moved the message into his “Follow Up” folder and returned to his sprint.
Later that spring, Barnett’s death rippled through a Senate committee hearing on Boeing. Pierson raised his hand to take the oath. His 2019 testimony had been laced with heartbreak, but now he was punchier, angrier, as he let loose his controversial take: “The manufacturing conditions that led to the two 737 Max disasters also led to the Alaska blowout accident, and these conditions continue.”
Boeing’s internal safety line was exploding. So was the FAA’s complaint line. With Pierson and other foundation folks all over the news, emails sailed in from former and current Boeing employees who wanted to commiserate. Thinking of Barnett, Pierson tried to get back to them quickly. Some Boeing dissidents invited Pierson to what they called the “Ed Head Picnic,” named in his honor. While yet another documentary filmmaker captured the gathering, the organizers knighted him “Whistleblower One” and hung a whistle around his neck.
It was late at night when Pierson saw the email from a Boeing employee. He clicked open one hell of an attachment: an internal Boeing record about the doomed Ethiopian Airlines plane.
Pierson burrowed under his blanket to shield Michelle, sleeping, from the glare of his phone. He zoomed in on a Boeing technical support log. It was from December 2018, not long after the Lion Air crash. It showed that the Ethiopian Airlines Max, which had been in service only a few weeks, had spontaneously rolled to the right while on autopilot. Pierson remembered that roll from the crash report. In this record, Ethiopian Airlines had asked Boeing to explain the cause and offer a fix.
Ed Pierson and his wife, Michelle, in the woods near their home outside Seattle.
What was new to Pierson was the Boeing engineer’s reply: Boeing had come to “suspect” an “intermittent fault” with some wiring to a flight control computer where MCAS resided and a component that receives angle-of-attack information. Boeing advised the airline to inspect specific wires for shorting or an open circuit. The plane crashed three months later.
Pierson was aghast. Concerns about the wiring, right there in words. He emailed the document to the Ethiopian crash investigators—the ones who’d blamed electrical defects, and who US and French authorities had dismissed. An investigator replied that he’d never seen this record. “I said, ‘How important would it have been to your investigation?’” Pierson recalls. “He said it was vital.” (Boeing says it shared information from this document with investigators, but didn’t answer a question on whether the company shared the document itself.)
A few months later, another email from the same Boeing insider: This one contained the Ethiopian plane’s manufacturing troubleshooting records that Pierson had chased years earlier—the Shipside Action Tracker records—as the plane moved down the Renton factory line in the fall of 2018, right after Pierson had retired. Reading through the entries, it seemed to Pierson that employees were confused about what electrical parts had been installed. They seemed to be talking about mislabeled components and a botched wire bundle job, plus pressure to get overdue parts from Boeing’s electrical device manufacturing shop in Everett, Washington. That shop had its own quality problems at the time. Responding to whistleblower tips, the FAA interviewed the shop’s staff and confirmed that employees had done unauthorized work on certain parts after quality inspectors had signed off, in violation of FAA rules. (The complaint doesn’t state which airplanes those parts were destined for.)
To Pierson, it all bolstered his contention that electrical problems could have caused the Ethiopian plane’s sensor failure—or, at least, that the notion should have been better examined.
Gathering the documents in late July, Pierson was summoning his football metaphors, saying he might make a “touchdown in the final seconds.” A deadline loomed: The US government had offered Boeing a new plea agreement after the door blowout, and the victims’ families—who blasted it as a “sweetheart” deal—were due to file their opposition. Pierson thought the families might want to use his new information in their arguments.
As it happened, the day before the families’ legal deadline, Pierson was slated to speak at the National Whistleblower Day in Washington, DC. So he and Michelle got an earlier flight. He didn’t want to be honored for past whistleblowing as much as do the actual thing: drop his documents straight into the hands of power.
Part of the motive for this grand dash was Pierson’s old-school flair: Emails get ignored. He likes the implicit pressure of showing up in person. (Pierson’s motto is “Red, white, and blue, this is the right thing to do,” said a former congressional staffer who has talked with him for years.) Pierson didn’t have time to set up meetings, so he waltzed door to door, from agency to agency, and worked his phone in the passenger seat of Ubers as he crisscrossed DC. Finally, back at his hotel that afternoon, he sat down and emailed the documents to the families and their attorney. After Milleron read them, “I was a complete mess,” she told me. “They could have taken that plane out of service and Samya would be alive.”
The next morning, at the National Whistleblower Day celebration, the Piersons filed into the grand marble chamber that once hosted the Watergate hearings. Michelle fastened a “Celebrate Whistleblowers!” pin to her purse.
More than 100 people filled the room: Whistleblowers from Exxon Mobil, MIT, a glut of federal agencies. Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins heartily shook Pierson’s hand. Big Tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, now in his eighties, joked to the crowd that he was actually Russell Crowe, who played him in The Insider. As a C-SPAN camera rolled, Pierson, now in a suit, held up his documents at the podium and announced his drop to the nation’s power brokers. Audience members jumped to their feet, clapping—a whiplash in public regard, given that 24 hours earlier he’d gotten bounced at the FBI.
This past October, Pierson and Jacobsen flew to Fort Worth, Texas, for a hearing about the proposed “sweetheart” plea deal for Boeing. The terms on offer: plead guilty to conspiring to defraud the US, pay another $243.6 million fine, and accept three years of probation. Nadia Milleron and her husband flew down from Massachusetts, joining other victims’ relatives from Ireland, France, and California. Chris Moore and his wife, Clariss, drove all the way from Toronto. (He boycotts flying.) Sitting down, the families spotted the foundation guys in the gallery and waved. Pierson and Jacobsen had shared their new documents directly with the judge, alleging they showed “Boeing’s continuing concealment of critical public safety information.” (The judge would reject the deal, and at press time, Boeing and the government were still talking about the resolution.)
After the October hearing, the families joined Pierson and Jacobsen at a Mexican restaurant. A boom mic from a documentary crew hovered above Pierson’s head. Jacobsen pulled out a suitcase from under the table, and Pierson handed out glass awards, from their foundation, honoring the families’ leadership on aviation safety. Pierson improvised a speech for each one.
Pierson still wrestles with his own grief, a wholly different kind. Could he have done more to prevent the crashes? “I don’t think I’ll ever—” He lets out a long exhale. “I’ll ever stop feeling that way.”
Listening, I thought about something Doug Pasternak, the lead investigator of the Max report, told me about his conversations with Pierson. “He was devastated. He did have a sense of, ‘guilt’ may not be the word, but responsibility. He just wishes there was something that could have been done to prevent these horrific accidents.”
Pierson couldn’t prevent the crashes, although no one I spoke to thought he could have done more. But he could become the guy hellbent on not letting another Max fall from the sky. He could hunch over every report to work out possible explanations in an RV kitchenette. He could be the fired-up guy pushing authorities to look—no really, look—under every last Boeing rock. If a corporate and regulatory culture of yes-men and -women led to the deaths of 346 people, then Pierson will happily be the nope man, awarding no benefit of the doubt.
The new documents, with all their promise of bringing home Pierson’s contested electrical theory, ended up amounting to less than he’d hoped. The NTSB told Pierson it wouldn’t hand the papers to the Max crash investigators—the cases had concluded, the board said—but he could do so himself.
Boeing wobbles in limbo, before civil and criminal courts, at the FAA, in Congress, awaiting the final door-plug report from the NTSB. Observers say 2025 will be Boeing’s pivotal year: The company either turns around under its new CEO or succumbs to a doom loop. Pierson vows to keep talking.
“For me, it was always about not allowing them to shut me up,” he says. Recently, the foundation received its first donations and now has a payroll. They’re starting to monitor other aircraft models and are talking with a university about analyzing industry-wide data—“to be an equal-opportunity pain in the butt,” Pierson says. The guy Boeing surely hoped would go away by now has, instead, institutionalized himself to stick around.
When Pierson said goodbye to me in DC, his parting words were: “Don’t fly the Max.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. That’s exactly what I was booked on, the 7:41 pm from Dulles to San Francisco. It was the one I could catch after the whistleblower event on Capitol Hill and still walk into my house that night. Commercial flight was supposed to be about convenience, after all, collapsing a country’s span into a Tuesday night commute. At this point in aviation history, we passengers should be able to pick a flight on time alone.
Hurtling through the air that evening in seat 10C, I read the US House committee’s Max investigation, a disruptor of illusions. Like many fliers, I’d long ago made my bargain with risk. I’d taken comfort in statistics, summoned faith in the engineers and assembly workers, the pilots, the system. I’d shunted away the knowledge—paralyzing, if you let it in—that stepping on an airplane is an extraordinary act of trust. Deep in the report, I reached the part about a senior manager at Boeing’s factory in Renton, a guy named Ed Pierson, who seemingly knew what we all know when we soothe ourselves by thinking, They wouldn’t let it fly if it weren’t safe. We’re all relying on someone to be the “they.”
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