Ten more Boeing whistleblowers have come forward to speak out against the company’s safety procedures despite two other whistleblowers having passed away suddenly.
One whistleblower was found dead from a gunshot wound while another died from an infection.
A whistleblower who left Boeing six years ago, Ed Pierson, is a former senior manager who went on to create the Foundation for Aviation Safety.
“It’s an unstable company right now from the top to the bottom,” Pierson told The New York Post. “Senior corporate leadership is so fixated on not admitting the truth that they can’t admit anything.”
“Boeing is an American icon,” he said. “This company is incredibly important to our country, both economically and in terms of national security with its commercial aviation side and its military defense work. But it doesn’t work when you have the wrong people driving the bus.”
Other whistleblowers include technical adviser to the Foundation for Aviation Safety and former FAA engineer Joe Jacobsen, an assistant professor at Ohio State University Shawn Pruchnicki, and quality engineer Sam Salehpour.
Salelpour recently warned Senate members that an “earthquake is coming” for Boeing’s airplane safety.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) asked Salehpour, “Are these planes safe?”
Salehpour responded, “It’s like an earthquake. The big earthquake is coming, and when that hits, the building has to be prepared to accommodate that kind of—let’s say—shake-up. It has to be built properly.”
“From what I’ve seen, the airplanes are not being built per spec and per requirements,” he added.
“Since 2013, there have been serious issues on the 787 program not properly closing thousands of gaps in its assembly of the fuselage on major joints. Boeing’s standard says that these joints, these gaps, must be closed, usually buy a small shim, or filler called the ‘shim’ when they exceed 5,000ths of an inch,” Salehpour said before the Senate. “This seems very small – Boeing’s PR team like to call it the width of a human hair – but when you are operating at 35,000 feet, details are that the size of a human hair can be a matter of life and death.”
