The Ben and Emil Show - BAES 39: Talking with a Boeing Whistleblower

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Get tickets to our live show in Brooklyn May 8th HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ben-and-emil-live-in-brooklyn-tickets-853000305877?aff=oddtdtcreator What's happening at Boeing is a public safety crisis. But it goes much deeper than Boeing -- it's the FAA, the DOT, the NTSB, and the airlines themselves. Former Boeing 737 Program senior manager Ed Pierson joins us to expose the corporate greed, criminal negligence, and government ineptitude that continue to put the public at risk. For more information about Ed you can visit his website at https://edpierson.com or his podcast, "Alarm Bells". Special thanks to Raimee Iacofano for co-producing. @ raimeetravel on Instagram and TikTok. __ We're sponsored by BLUECHEW! Head to https://bluechew.com and use code "BAES" at checkout for your first month FREE. Just pay $5 shipping. We're also sponsored by INCOGNI -- keep your private data out of the hands of data brokers. Use code PAYPIGS at https://incogni.com/paypigs for an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. __ Support our humble podcast and get bonus episodes at https://www.benandemilshow.com All our previous bonus episodes are up there! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay, welcome back to the cuss-free episode of the first cuss-free episode of Ben and Emile. We've got a really big episode for you today, guys. We're talking about all the stuff that's going on with Boeing. We have a very special guest who is an ongoing. He's a former Boeing employee. He is a turned whistleblower now advocate for flight safety and regulation. Yeah, so we're going to get into that. And before we do, just a couple things up front.

We've got our live show coming up on May 8th in New York. Tickets are now available to the public. They went live to Benin and Meal Show members last week. And they are now available to the public. We'll put a link here in the description. I don't know exactly how many tickets are left after this. Not a lot left. It says on the event, right, there are a few tickets left.

So if you want to come see us in Brooklyn on May 8th at the Bell House, I would go get your tickets as soon as possible. because it says there's a few left. That's exactly right. And also next week for our subscribers, we're going to be doing our monthly Q&A, so go get all signed up. You know how it goes,

and it's linked to the Discord and all that. Bannonameel Show.com. But... Oh, also just one more point on that. I know some people are having some trouble with some of the features on the app. We are releasing a native app very soon. Hopefully we'll have the exact date imminently.

But it's coming. It's coming. It's going to be great. You're going to love it. Oh, man, I smell that garlic breath now. Dude, I'm sorry. It's okay. I ate a gigantic falafel.

And it was that kind of garlic that just like stings your tongue. He comes in and just goes, I'm so sorry. I just ate all this garlic. It didn't even think until it touched my tongue. But now it's that kind of breath that's like emanating from deep within. Oh, yeah. Oh, man. There was a guy at the gym yesterday with that.

He had like an aura around him. Just a bubble, 15 feet. Just the air was just. Ugh. That's me. My man. Right now. Anyway.

And if I start to sweat, this whole... God help us. Yeah. Okay, gang. What's going on with Boeing? It used to be, if it ain't Boeing, I ain't going. But now if it's, now it's, if it is Boeing, I'm not going to go. If it ain't Airbus, I'm making a fuss.

If it ain't Airbus, I'm making a fuss. Or in Airbus, I trust. That's why we should have. asked him that. Well, so let's catch you all up with the timeline, okay? So on Monday, yesterday for us, three days ago for you guys, there was a quote-unquote technical event that caused a 787 dreamliner, which is a Boeing. Anything with a 7 in front of his Boeing. Anything with a 7 in front of it. So Seagram 7-7, that's a Boeing drink. Yeah, that's right. That's what they serve on the plane. Philadelphia 76ers. That's a Boeing basketball team. Yeah, they're an affiliate.

it but this 787 nose dived on a flight from Sydney to Chile and 50 people were injured I don't think it was to Chile I think it was I think it was Sydney to Auckland or something that's what I read it first but then it's Latteam Airlines yeah it was meant to go on to Chile oh gotcha gotcha well they said they put out the most bullshit corporate speak press line a technical event occurred during the flight which caused a strong movement. Yeah, no fucking shit. Yeah, 50 people got injured. Oh, man, I hate when a technical event occurs when I'm...

And tosses people in the air. Yeah. Also, which is just a reminder to keep your seatbelt fastened. There's a reason why they always tell you to keep your seatbelt fast. I'll tell you what? Up until like a couple years ago, I was a not a seatbelt put her on or on the airplane. I was like, what's this going to do for me? And now I realize it can help you not get sucked out of the plane when the door plug comes off. Or like that little boy who famously got his shirt. sucked off. But so the same day, a united triple seven favorite, oh, God, I love the triple seven.

Also from Sydney. What's going on down under? Well, it's not only there, but a lot of these are occurring with United flights in and out of SFO because this one was bound for San Francisco. They had to turn around due to a maintenance issue, but. there was footage because thank God for these aviation dorks who I just love. And they're always, if you're taking off on an airplane, you can guarantee that there's some guy, some sexless virgin out there with a camera filming it to put it on.

I shouldn't say that. I'm sure that they're fine. Anyway, someone got a video of it taking off. It's probably guys who are having lots of sex. Yeah, they're probably truly laying pipe all the time. But the triple seven's taken off, and as the gear is retracting, there's clearly what appears to be fuel just dumping out of the... And it's not supposed to do that? That's not supposed to do that. See, I'm not a plane guy. I thought maybe...

Yeah, no, no, no. And so when they turned around and landed, the tires were like smoldering probably due to the friction and then, you know, the fuel being on there. But so then the same day also on Monday, another United, it was a 737-900. not a max, but at 737-900 nonetheless, had flames shooting out of the engine. And again, they're not supposed to do that? It's not supposed to do that. And it had to emergency land after takeoff. But so this one's a little tricky

because it makes you at first one and be like, damn, it's another Boeing, which it is. And also, it might look sick as hell. Yeah. If I were on the plane, I'd be going, damn, we're going so fast. It was caused by bubble wrap caught in the engine.

and two important things so g e makes their engines so it's not necessarily a bowing fault not that i'm at all defending fucking boeing who i'm super pissed at right now not even talking to bowing they used to be boys but bubble wrap okay everybody this uh this very serious episode is brought to you by blue chew where it's um i got to tell you it is blue chew rocks it it it just works I'm so fired up on Blue Chew right now. No, you're not. I always am. But if you were, that's just a testament to how it works because it's ready when you are.

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Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. And we thank Blu for sponsoring this podcast. What's going on with the bubble wrap at the airports? Who's popping bubble wrap anywhere on the tarmac or whatever shit? I want to know how that. to open up an investigation to figure out why there was bubble wrap i feel like it's pretty easy how why because you figure a lot of things are getting shipped oh sure all right and there's bubble wrap and bubble wrap you just need bubble wrap yeah that's true man i just got um i just got something in the mail and it come it came

with like primo bubble wrap i'm talking the classic tiny ones the time not this not the big stuff now and i just was just cracking that stuff you ever twist them oh brother do i twist them Of course, what am I? What about was I born yesterday? And so then on Friday, this last Friday, you had a United 737 Max 8 run off the runway in Houston. They don't know. They're still investing in that. It's not supposed to do that, I guess.

Yeah, it's not supposed to do that. But planes sometimes do that when they're excited. Sure. They'll like run off the runway because they're just like, oh. Boeing's having a tough time. Yeah, they're having a tough time. Also Friday, another United plane. from San Francisco to Mexico City

had to emergency divert to L.A. due to a hydraulics issue, but it was an airbus. It wasn't a Boeing. And then last Thursday, an older, as everybody saw on the news, the one that kind of kicked it off was the older Triple-7 United Flight

bound for Osaka from San Francisco. Lost a freaking tire. Lost a freaking tire. Just popped off. as it's taken off. On some Looney Tune shit, the plane lost the tire and it fell down and crushed.

Fortunately, nobody was injured, but it landed on a couple cars. On sexless virgin. Yeah. In the parking lot. And, yeah, United came out and said, well, these incidents, and they're right. I mean, if we're going to be,

if we're going to use our critical thinking skills here, these incidents, as they said, they are all distinct and unrelated. but, uh, what? Dylan, oh, he kicked the camera. Dylan, God damn it. But also, last month, we had a United 737 max

taxiing at Newark. And as soon as it got to the gate, there were no incidents, but the pilots were like, yo, the rattle, the foot pedal, fuck, let me take that again from the top. The, um, the foot pedal rudders. The, that's redundant. The fucking rudders that you, that,

there we go. It's so the pilot can kick his feet when the pilot's happy. It's just to absorb it. No, I'm just kidding. It's to steer the plane when they're taxing. And also it controls the rear stabilizer fin when they're in flight. But they were stuck. And Boeing went out and they resolved it.

It was three replacement parts. But still, a lot of fucking issues going on. Something stinks at Boeing. Someone shit in a bag and lit it on fire in front of Boeing. and rumor has the bag is still burning. It's poop again. It's poop again. They couldn't get anybody to come out and stomp it out

because they're too busy collecting and counting their money. That was me licking my thumb to collect or count invisible wads of cash. Why don't you tell us about the audit, man? What's going on with that audit? What else? I feel like we're bearing the lead here. Okay. because in the midst of all this awful Boeing stuff

that's going on a former Boeing employee who's been a long time whistleblower since he retired in 2017 he worked at Boeing for 32 years his name is John Barnett and he just what they're calling a suicide an apparent self-inflicted gunshot which a lot of people are putting in quotes because it's fishy. It's extremely fishy.

You know, Boeing is trying to save face in the midst of all this. And he is in the middle of delivering testimony in a defamation case against Boeing. And, you know, so it's all just very odd. He apparently shot himself in the hotel parking lot. He was staying in on, you know, he got in the car to go. to his to go give testimony and then just shot himself.

According to his lawyer, he was supposed to do the third day of his deposition on his whistleblower case. And when he didn't show up, they went looking for him and they found him in his. It's all very Michael Claytony.

You ever seen Michael Clayton? Yeah, I've seen Michael Clayton. It's as suspicious as it gets with a company like Boeing doing everything that they've done to cut corners, as John Barnett was specifically pointing out.

Like, that was the case. against Boeing basically he was speaking up about how they were cutting corners and Boeing has made it very clear they're fine killing people in order to boost profits truly oh they're totally so I guarantee they have they have in their lawyer speak or accountant speak have have basically been like well you know all things considered with these hundreds of people dying the stock price didn't react as adversely as we previously thought and forecast show that blah blah oh 100 we can endure another accident. So they put it into the calculus of these things, undeniably, they put it into the

calculus of these things about how much can we afford how many mistakes or how many new processes and oversights can we afford to skip again to kick the can down the road if, you know, maybe there's an accident in another few years. We can afford to do it if in that time the stock price recovers enough to make it, you know, fucking negligible. And so Barnett had talked to the BBC about some of the things he wanted to speak out about. And, I mean, it's all awful. You know, he said that under pressure workers had been deliberately fitting substandard parts to aircraft on the production line. He said that he had uncovered serious problems with oxygen systems, which could mean one and four breathing masks would not work in an emergency.

He also said soon after starting work in South Carolina, he had become concerned that the push to get new aircraft built, meant the assembly process was rushed and safety was compromised, something the company denied. He later told the BBC that workers had failed to follow procedures intended to track components through the factory, allowing defective components to go missing. And then he said substandard parts had even been removed from scrap bins and fitted to planes that were being built to prevent delays on the production line. And they claimed tests on the emergency oxygen systems due to be fitted to the 787 showed a 25% failure rate. Yeah, he alerted his managers on all these things.

And no action being taken. My favorite quote from him is, so he had been transferred in, excuse me, I'm getting over a cold. He had been transferred to South Carolina to work on the 787, and he was noting that this new leadership came in. God damn. He had noted this new leadership had come in from the military side of Boeing, from St. Louis, and they just kind of were like big, Dick's, like, hey, we can do whatever we want. We're just going to run this shit. And he said, quote, they started pressuring us to not document defects to work outside

the procedures to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected, bypassing procedures and not maintaining configuration control of airplanes. They just wanted to get the planes pushed out the door and make the cash register ring, which is a recurring theme you'll hear in our talk with Ed Pearson coming up. And John Barnett had also been talking to reporters recently about the Alaska Airlines door plug incident. And he said, quote, once you understand what's happening inside of Boeing, you'll see why we're seeing these kinds of issues. So what a fucking mess. Boeing, how could you, how dare you?

Fuck you. Big, big, big, big, fuck you to the CEO in the entire C-suite at Boeing. guys are um you know i i would say at this point you got a pretty good case for hell um after you die i mean that's just me i'm not necessarily religious but if it exists you're probably going to it's not looking too good you know it's not looking too good but it's not looking good for them at all you know so outside of the john barnett thing you also mentioned the audit it's uh yeah there was the six week f a audit audit of boeing and their subcontractor spirit aerosystems um obviously another fucking mess uh you don't want to get on one of these planes they found multiple

instances where the companies allegedly failed to comply with manufacturing quality control requirements the plane maker passed 56 of the audits and failed 33 of them with a total of 97 instances of uh of alleged noncompliance uh can i give you my favorite one from spirit dude wait is it the don't soap uh it's both so the f a a observed because this one's fucking crazy Yeah, yeah. The FAA says that they observed spirit. So Spirit Aerosystems makes the fuselage, the body of the airplane that you sit in. And they said that they saw spirit mechanics using a hotel key card to check a door seal.

I mean, I'd like to see them. What do they suggest? I've seen the movies. That's how you get indoors. Yeah, you get indoors. And they applied liquid dawn soap to a door seal as lubricant in the fit up process. The door seal was then cleaned. With a wet cheesecloth, noting that instructions were vague and unclear on what specifications

or actions are to be followed or recorded by the mechanic. I don't know. I would say, like, just use the proper lubricant and then get a fucking shop rag to wipe it up instead of a wet cheesecloth. You don't think Dawn soap is going to do the job? I don't know, man. It cleans up oil-covered baby ducks or whatever the fuck. And it drives me insane, man, you know, you know the sign of someone who's on the struggle

bus you go to their kitchen sink and they don't they they just have a dish soap for hand soap drives me up the wall i'm like how am i supposed to wash my hands i'm about to dry the shit out of my hands applying gone soap i've been one of those guys yeah of course you have i'm calling you out yeah that's this is particularly fucked up because ben's been at my house and and said why's it fucking sucks when that happens this whole episode's basically just a sub tweet at me yeah The FAA also examined how well Boeing employees understood the company's quality control processes. Six engineers were interviewed, and they got an average score of 58%. That's flunking.

That's a flunk score. That's a fucking flunk score to those 16 years. I mean, this is all coming out now, but it's been such a mess over there for so long. There's a, and all this stuff is now resurfacing again because of what Boeing is going through, but there's a, I think it was Al Jazeera went in undercover. Oh, it was 10 years ago. It was 10 years ago.

Yeah. And they're talking to the employees, the engineers and the people working in the factory and they're gone. I wouldn't get on one of these. Well, they're asking, would you get on one of these planes? No fucking way. I think it was, I think it was 10 out of 15 of the factory workers, they asked, they said. I won't fucking get on one of these.

I wouldn't get on one of these. Well, so, yeah, let's, so we've got, we're about to kick it off with Ed Pearson and we hope you guys enjoy this little segment with him. He's a very good guy and we had to really scramble. Thanks to Ramey for, oh God, excuse me. Rame Iacophano, who's produced this segment and she made it happen really, really fast for us. And if you don't follow her, oh man, she's the best. We got all of her. info in the in the description as well but all right let's cut to the interview hey everybody we we just got one more little break from our commercial sponsor here we've got incogny look there's a problem

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There are absolutely people on the dark web who broker these kind of things. And any time you hear about some kind of big hack out there, it's these people doing it. So the good news, that's the bad news. The good news is that you have the right to protect your privacy by requesting data brokers to delete what information they have about you. I mean, I was talking about the dark web. There's absolutely that, but there are these people. Let's talk about the light web for a second.

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incogny plan. Incogny.com slash paypigs. All right, and we've got Ed Pearson with us. Thank you very much for joining us, Ed. If you want to just give us a brief background in who you are and what you've been doing these last few years as it pertain. to Boeing. Sure. Well, thanks for having me. Again, my name is Ed Pearson. I'm the executive director for the Foundation for Aviation Safety, and it's a group of people that have come together

to try to shine a light on some of the things that are happening in the aviation industry that we think the public is unaware of. And the roots of it. We have been working with victim family members and some people in the industry, but also in common. and the federal government to make changes because we think that there's a lot of issues that are that are not going in the direction we want them to go. And aviation safety is very important. To me, I worked at the Boeing company. I was a senior manager at the 737 factory in Renton, Washington, where the max airplane was built. While that plane was being built, I was uncomfortable, let's just say, about the chaotic production environment and the dangerous

operations that were going on. So I attempted unsuccessfully to try to get them to shut the factory down. And it didn't happen. And I went up the chain and eventually we had the two crashes, Lionair and Ethiopian air. Prior to that, I worked in the Boeing company in a variety of positions. I worked in the flight testing evaluation organization. Also worked in a organization that was involved in software development for the 7-887. I had previously run a couple small companies in software and also had served in the military. I served in the military for 30 years.

I flew in the military. I was a navigator and naval flight officer, it's called, served in a variety of positions, including maintenance officer, operations officer, squadron commanding officer i was an opposite center director so i had a pretty diverse background in the military and um you know i've always had interest in aviation since i was a kid um and i know that you guys a lot of people ask questions of us in the foundation um you know tell us about the max airplane and explain to us what your concerns are and how do we schedule around it and i guess i just wanted to share

this one story because I think it's so compelling. There's a gentleman, his name is Paul Girogi, and Paul is from Kenya. He grew up in Kenya, and then he moved to Canada. He lives in Toronto, Canada now. He's a finance person, professional. And we had Paul on our podcast about a year, year and a half ago, and we were talking to him about the Max disasters. And he said, you know, Ed, I, I didn't know. Had I known, had I been informed, I never would have put my family on this plane. And I never would have put my three kids, my wife and my mother-in-law on the plane. He lost his entire family on that plane. Oh, my God. Yeah. And that was pretty heart-wrenching, to say to the least, you know, what do you say to a guy who had lost his

family and you know i had asked him that anybody from the bowling company ever apologized to you and he said no um and every month or so and we work closely with victim family members now they've become friends of ours and people that we work with um and we help them we provide technical assistance to them um they provide kind of the heart and soul for the foundation because they don't want us to happen to anybody else. And that's the last thing they want to have happen. And nobody wants another preventable disaster. So that's why I ringing the bell. In fact, that's what we called our podcast warning bells is because we wanted to alert people. So this has been something we've been working on for over six years now. Even though the foundation is new, there's been a lot of

effort to try to raise attention. And people are hearing all the marketing. the imaging, about the airplanes, Boeing company, what the FAA is doing. So I know you guys want to jump in, but that's kind of a long introduction, but I thought it would be helpful just to kind of set the baseline of where I'm coming from. No, that's great. That's really helpful. And I just want to reiterate. So you were, you were blowing the whistle trying to run this up the chain even before the crashes in 2018 with what you saw. Yes, that's right. That's right. Before the first crash, I had gone to the general manager. I had talked to other senior people at the factory, but I went to the senior most person and said, look, this plane, you know, these planes are

potentially unsafe and that we could have defects in these airplanes just from my own professional experience, but also because of my, my teams were telling me this, that these people that I work with were saying, you know, people were making mistakes. They were working people ridiculously long hours. I mean like eight or ten weeks straight with no breaks, sometimes seven days a week. These are building planes now. And we didn't have all the parts we needed. We didn't have all the test equipment. It was just a disaster waiting to happen. And so I tried to get them to shut the factory down. You know, and I gave them examples of problems that we were seeing in our functional testing, like our electrical systems testing that was failing regularly,

some of our control surface testing, which is all the movable surfaces on the airplane. We test our hydraulic testing, you name it, engine testing. We were having all kinds of issues. And this is just for the 737 Max factory, right? That's right. Yeah, the 737 factory. And, you know, the corporate leadership was just pushing to get the planes out the door

to sell them because they were making billions of dollars. Right. And sadly, the first crash happened. And then between the first crash and second crash, I communicated with the CEO, the board of directors, the general counsel, the company. And I tried unsuccessfully to get them to look into the factory as a possible cause for the crashes. And they refused to do that. And eventually, you know, the second crash happened. And then Congress got winded this and asked me to take it.

testify, and that's ever since then, you know, it's become a bit of an obsession for me and some other people to try to, you know, get to the truth. I'm sure. I mean, after that very first crash, like going into work that day must have felt like a nightmare because it's something that you'd been ringing the bell on for weeks, months, I'm assuming, and then this disaster that you basically predicted could happen in the worst possible way, finally happens, and you would think that everybody above you who you spoke to about exactly this would be a light bulb moment and just nothing happens. How frustrating was that? Well, just to get the timing correct, the whole thing was extremely frustrating. It is still extremely frustrating. But what happened

was I made a decision that I was going to retire early. I had planned to stay in the company for another six or seven years, but I just couldn't continue to work in that type of culture and environment with that lack of leadership. And so I had my, I retired in August and then the first crash happened in October. And I was actually, I believe it or not, I was assistant high school football coach just as a, you know, kind of something to do, you know, because I really enjoyed working with young people. And I was watching the TV, but I was working on a scouting report. and that's when the Lionair accident came up. That's the first time I saw it.

And it was exactly how you described it, Ben. It was, you know, my stomach dropped. I was sick. I couldn't believe it. You know, I'm watching on the TV screen and these people that are showing up at the airport in Jakarta, Indonesia, they don't even know what happened.

And I know from watching the news that the plane had crashed into the ocean. And these people were showing up for the first time. You know, you're watching this overseas. You know, it's horrible. And my first thought was, oh, my God, that was a brand new plan. It came through our factory, and I looked it up, and it was, you know, it was only a couple months old, two months old. And, you know, I can't describe it.

I mean, then the reaction was, oh, it was the pilot's fault. Right, I remember. All the pilots fault or the maintenance people at Line Air. There was no, taken to no responsibility, no accountability for what happened, completely displacing this on the pilots. And then everything kind of died down in the news because it was, oh, that was overseas. And there was a lot of, you know, experts out there, all these professionals on the news talking about, you know, what a terrible airline in the lion air is. And they were really, you know, criticizing almost an entire country. Right.

They were saying that they had like substandard protocols to follow maintenance stuff that that's just, it's not like here in the United States. It's essentially a third world country that's dealing with this stuff. Of course they crashed kind of thing, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. There's this unfair criticism that, you know, somehow the U.S. pilots and the U.S. airlines, would have absolutely avoided that same disaster. And then, of course, the second crash happens.

And now they attempt to continue to blame the pilots. And then the United States pilots came out of the woodwork. And we're like, wait a minute, time out. You don't stop blaming these pilots. You gave us this bad information, too. It could have happened to us. And we had some of our most famous pilots, like Captain Sully Sullenberger, for example,

and a gentleman that I work with all the time, Captain Dennis Tazier, and they were like, hey, this is, this is not right. You can't be blaming them for this. They didn't know about this software. They weren't trained on it. It took over the control of the plane. And so all that started to surface. And now all of a sudden, they, you know, they started covering their ass.

Excuse my language, but they started, you know, CYA. And then they then they withheld records and wouldn't provide the information to the investigative authorities. sounds a lot like what they're doing now, believe it or not, with the Alaska Airlines accident, and they went into cover-up mode. And there was just, thankfully, there was some congressional hearings that brought things to the surface, the truth, part of the truth, I should say, not all of it. There's a whole bunch that we've learned in the last six years, a whole bunch that happened about those airplanes and about, you know, the technical aspects of what caused it. One of the questions I had asked early on to the, to the seat, to the general

council of the company back before the first, before the second crash, you know, because he was telling me that they were talking to the investigators. And I said, well, was anybody, you know, looking at the factory and the possibility there could have been electrical problems? And, you know, he didn't want to go there. He said, well, that's up to the technical people. And I always had my suspicions that maybe, you know, why did the sensor fail? Because you know, the sensor is a ruggedized, sturdy piece of equipment. It's not like it's, you know, super flimsy. And it's got a little bit of a, you know, about yay big weather vein like looking end on it.

And I was wondering, you know, how did the sensor fail? I mean, you know, what could have caused that? And the more I dug, the more I realized that, you know, the manufacturing issues certainly point to that. the public has heard the story, you know, because there's been a whole bunch of, like I said, there's been a whole bunch of engineers and safety experts for the last couple of years talking about MCF software that it was the MCF software caused it and the pilot lack of pot in training. And that's true. Those absolutely played a role, but why did the sensor fail?

And that's something that I've been searching for, interviewing people, investigating, analyzing it. And it's very obvious to me that those airplanes, both those airplanes, had electrical defects in them, manufacturing defects in them that caused those sensors to fail. And that's what triggered these accidents. Right. And sorry, just as a kind of refresher, the MCAS software is what was responsible for, it would kick in if the nose, if it thought the nose was like too high up in that the plane was about. to stall, it would override the pilots' controls and put it in a nose-down pitch to help it recover from or prevent a stall, correct?

Exactly. That's exactly what... Right. And it was that, it was that new software because the 737 model up to that point was newer and, like, they had moved the engines around, so the physics of the plane were such that the pilots needed new training. So that was all the story that I understand as a member of the public. But what is this sensor you're talking about?

So the sensor is the angle of attack sensor. That's what measures that you were just describing. And it was sending a faulty data to the software. And the software then in turn caused the motor that drove that stabilizer that caused the plane to go up and down. So the sensor provided it's kind of like a speedometer. you know, censored, sending a signal to your, to your gauge, for example. And it was sending this false signal. And, you know, it's very obvious that the company didn't want to admit to anything, right?

They certainly didn't want to admit that they had any, you know, fault in the accident. You know, like we said, they tried to blame the pilots. Then they tried to blame the maintenance personnel at the airlines. Then they tried to claim that these pilots were, you know, somehow not as skilled and qualified. as U.S. pilots, you know, they did everything they could but accept responsibility for what they did. And then there was investigations that went on. And even though I had testified to Congress and I provided tons of documents and the names of 50 people that they could talk to and different production records that they could look up, they didn't go into the factory, the National

Transportation Safety Board. You know, you had a two-month-old and a four-month-old. the plane that crashed. We didn't find this out, by the way, until last summer, not this past summer, but the summer prior, a mother who lost her daughter, 24-year-old daughter and I were talking, and I was mentioning to her that, you know, I'm so frustrated. The National Transportation Safety Board really hasn't investigated this. And she said, well, let's have a meeting with them. I said, okay. So she arranged for a meeting. And during that meeting, I presented all this information to show the current problems that we're having in service right now. This is, there's a lot of issues that are happening in service.

And this was all before the last week or two of news, you know, stuff. There's been a lot of issues associated with the max airplanes that people are unaware of. We did a whole report on Alaska Airlines, believe or not, we had actually written, I had written a letter to the Alaska CEO in April, a 23, telling him that we were looking at his data. And it was very obvious that there was a lot of production quality. defects on his planes. He had over 1,200 aircraft system malfunctioned reports on 53 airplanes. And that's not normal, right? No. No. And it's also, it's also, it's also concerning because

it's not so much the number of the reports, it's the content. Like, what's the top? You know, you could have, you know, more reports on something that's not nearly as significant as, say, the engine, of the airplane, but we were trying to alert him to the fact that, you know, there's, there's some indicators here that your airplanes are not, are not good, new airplanes. And, you know, and then, of course, there was the Alaska accident that actually happened. And now everybody is realizing that all those issues that, you know, myself and others were trying to raise about the manufacturing problems that are occurring, people are starting to light bulbs are going off and people were realizing that this is a lot more serious than they thought. And just in the last

what two weeks, you've had the NTSB come out, even though Boeing said they were fully cooperating and going to be transparent. They obviously weren't even providing information to the NTSB. What do you attribute that to? Is it is it, is it, is it, is it, I don't want to say corruption on the government level, but is it lobbying on the part of a company as massive as Boeing? Is it that they've got... Well, isn't a lot of it, it's defunding and defangging a lot of these regulatory bodies, right? I think there was a lot of...

Wasn't a lot of this left up to Boeing at certain points where Boeing was kind of self-certifying and self-regulating? Because bodies like the FAA just didn't have the... Resources. Yeah, just didn't have the resources or the manpower to be going into the... these factories and facilities to check in on things. Yeah, I would say you're both right. I mean, you're both absolutely right.

There's been a lot of deregulation. You know, the FAA, the three years that I worked in the factory, I never saw an FAA employee the entire time I was there. None of my employees that worked on the factory floor said they'd ever seen an FAA employee. I found out later, years later, they had four employees working at the factory and a manager, and, you know, that's ridiculous when you have thousands of employees working in this gigantic facility, you know, several gigantic buildings working around the clock to think that you could, you know, I said, look, you know, we had more administrative assistance in our group

than you guys had, you know, monitoring the operations of the busiest airplane facility in the world. Now, you would think that that would have changed, and it really hadn't changed hardly at all. Even up to this day, they only have, I think they deployed up to 20 people now into the facility, is a joke. It's not nearly enough people to watch all these operations. You have to understand that, you know, there's 30 airplanes in a building at a time when they're building them, you know, and that's just on one shift. And then you have three shifts. So, but, you know, it's not like the FAA doesn't have the resources. People don't understand. The FAA's got about 45,000 people in their workforce, 15,000 are air traffic controllers. But there's still another 30,000 people. In fact,

the northwest regional headquarters for the FAA is a 1,600 person building that is, you know, 20 minutes down the road from the factory. And you have to ask yourself, you know, you have that many people that are right down the road. Why don't you put more of them into the factory? That was the one of me. We had a meeting last week. I think I told you guys with the head of the FAA and the deputy and as we talked about, the deputy secretary of transportation. And we said you need to put a lot more people under these buildings. You've got to put them out there.

And so they're at present. They're in the vicinity. It will have a very amazing effect because now the stress and the pressure they're putting on employees, when you put an FAA person in that environment and they're watching this, they're going to think twice about, you know, pressure in these employees to work the hours that they're working, to cut the corners that they're taken, not to follow the processes properly. you know, it's really a lack of regulatory oversight, Emil's that what you were describing is it's a big part of that.

And there are resources available, is what I'm saying. And don't let anybody believe that they have resources. They just have to deploy it differently. Yeah, do you have any insight on why those resources aren't being deployed correctly? Well, I think it gets back to your point that you just alluded to, which is that the Boeing company doesn't want the FAA. Right, because they've got a record backlog that they've had for years, and the higher the stock goes, the more likely the executives get their big stock-based compensation packages, and the more that they please Wall Street, the better the stock's performing, and the more it becomes a darling, and it just becomes this feedback loop at the expense of the traveling public. Exactly. So there's an enrichment that's occurring, and I want to talk about the Boeing employees, if I can, for just a second. because I always have to caution this because, excuse me, there are some amazing, I mean,

most of the people at the Boeing company are amazingly hardworking, dedicated people, right? Even in the government agencies, I would say that. But when you have misguided leaders who have messed up priorities, and you guys, everybody has worked in an organization where they've had a boss that they thought the world of and thought that he or she was just amazing, they would do anything for, and then a new boss comes in and completely changes the whole, you know, the whole environment. You know, we've all seen that. And it really is about failed leadership. And I don't just mean, I absolutely mean at the top level, like the C-suite is crushing and killing this company. They just continue

to make broken promises. They're out of touch. They're completely out of touch. They're rarely down with the frontline employees. And when they are, they try to make a big deal of it, like they're, you know, some rock star coming down and, you know, gracing you with their presence. And you have this government who the government, and it's not just, I want to be clear, I'm not saying this is a political statement, but this has been going on for years. You know, it criss crosses, you know, all parties. But you have this government agency who's not doing their job, you know, who is easier to sit off to the side and wait for something to happen and then act like they're doing something.

Everything they're doing, and I told the FAA head, I said, you guys have become lazy. And I use some other choice words that Ramey posted on her site. And, you know, if you look in the notes page, we were very direct. We were very clear about it. These are serious problems that you need to admit. But you guys know, it's like an attic. You know, if you have an attic or somebody, alcoholic or whoever, if you have that in your family or you know anybody, if they can't admit it that they're having these problems. They're not going to go fix it, right?

There's no, so there's no admission that these problems are caused by the senior leadership. There's no admission that they screwed up and that it was their fault, you know, that these people died and the company lost $20-something billion and there's criminal charges that are still unresolved. And these families, I mean, imagine these families. We work with these individuals every day. We get emails and text messages from a group of them. you know could you imagine losing a loved one like that and and then finding out every other month that there was a new revelation that had had they done the right thing never would have happened you know like constantly ripping the band-aid off of these people you know the wounds

and and here they are despite their losses right despite the grief that they still have and and all that and they're out there fighting for all of us like they're out there to make sure that you guys and your families and my families, my family are not endangered by this corporate greed, failed leadership. And I want to say this, if you don't mind, thank you guys for giving me some space here to talk because I've done, I don't know, a couple hundred interviews and usually get a minute or two minutes to try to package something complicated in. So I just want to share with you that when I talk about leadership, not only am I talking about the senior level leadership, the senior people. I'm talking all the way down to the frontline employee. And what I

mean by that is, you know, that frontline employee hopefully has been properly trained. If they have been trained, they know something that's not right. They know something is wrong, right? And they need to speak up. They need to feel like they can speak up and say, hey, this something's wrong here. I don't like it. You know, they need to have that situational leadership. leadership to say, you know, I'm uncomfortable. I think we need to stop. We need to fix it, right? And we've had people, many people do that. And it's been successful. And we've had people do it. And they've gotten overruled by poor leadership, you know, above them. But in some cases, there have been people who have just said, you know, it's the end of the day, I want to get out of here.

If my shift is over soon, I, this is good enough, you know, and kind of. thing and we've seen those issues we've had them in the factory where people identified defects and said oh wait how you know how did this happen you know and you find out that you know somebody made a bad decision somebody upstream the production system took a shortcut and and you hope you catch those things um you know but overall like i would say that absolute you know vast majority of people are trying to do the right thing they're trying to do their job and they're trying to build the plane properly. And you have to understand also that I had an image in my mind at, you know, when I first moved to into the factory, I was expecting it to be like, you know, like a GM or a Ford

factory with a bunch of robots and all this cool stuff. And, you know, if you need to put more, push more planes out the door, you can just throw in more raw material and kind of turn the knob. But what I realized was these are skilled employees. These are individuals who come in and get trained and they they they um uh it takes a lot of effort and work and we're not providing enough training for them um they're being put on the line i just found out that the employees are getting eight weeks of initial training they're putting them on the line and then an eight weeks of training you know that's like the basics if that and then they're supposed to get additional training um from the call peer to peer training they call it but the problem is their peer

Ben is my peer, but Ben, Ben has got a job to do today. Ben has to do all this work. Yeah, but I want to go home. Can we fix this tomorrow, man? Please. Right. I mean, it's whatever. And that's not, you know, you don't want people building planes like that. No. You don't want people to build rushed. You don't want people to do the job right. Here's another thing that people don't understand. The company has removed thousands of quality control inspections, even after the two fatal crashes. thousands of quality control inspection what is the rationale behind that how does someone justify that well if your planes aren't going to pass quality control you got to get them out the door so that's true but like well that's that's one way you would think that though that they're sorry that

their whole thing is like okay we want to preserve uh stock value at the end of the day that is what they're pushing for don't they have the foresight to to think like hey if uh if we if we cut corners now really going to bite us in the ass in the future and it's going to it's going to right like right now you can see on travel companies like kayak.com for example they now at first it was a bit harder to find but now people they're finding that people are using this feature so much they're they're putting it more promptly but you can now sort your flights by whether or not you'll have to get on a 737 max so i mean it's obviously i mean the fact that the general public is now aware of different models. I don't think before

I mean. Well, let's talk about that. Yeah. I mean, so yeah, sorry, my original question. Who the fuck? It's good. I mean, what you're saying, I'm trying to catch up to you because you made a couple points. Ben, I want to talk both what you're saying. So you asked the question, which is a really good question, don't they have the foresight to realize

they're just kind of, you know, cutting their nose off despite their face or whatever the thing is? You would think that. But what we found is that of senior corporate leaders, they're not even, they don't understand what's happening in the factory. They don't spend any time here. So they don't really, so they have that same belief. I think a lot of them, maybe the board of directors in particular, they have that same belief. Well, yeah, we're going to

increase production from 38 to 42. No problem. We'll just throw some more parts at it. They don't realize that the team is stressed out to the max, just trying to build the planes that they currently have. So they're, because they're so far out of touch, because they're so unaware of the complexity of the operations, and they sit in their corporate offices, they have no, idea of the impact that they're making. So they're looking through everything they're looking through is a spreadsheet, right? It's a, it's a stock price, a stock value. That's what they're focused on. And then, as far as the flights go, you pointed out, yeah, some of those places like kayak are starting to allow you to filter out the max. But this is the problem. And this is

what happened to Ramey. It happened to my daughter, Amanda, four times in the last year. She purposely scheduled herself away from a max airplane. And for your listening, that's a 737-8 and 737-9, not to be confused with the 737-800 or 900 series or different model planes. I know it's a pain. Yeah. But 737-8 and 737-9. So you schedule yourself away from it and then you arrive at the airport and you go to your

gate and you find out that, oh, your gate moved or, oh, they changed the plane and you didn't even know about it. They didn't even tell you. And now you find yourself on a max. It happened to me last year. from Seattle to Newark, New Jersey, and I did everything I could to avoid the max, and I checked before I got, you know, my ticket, I checked, you know, after I went to security, I check when I got my coffee. Everything is good. Get on a plane. Wow, this is kind of new. Walked in my seat, sat down,

looked ahead and saw the max card, you know. Oh, God. Couldn't believe it, you know. And so I got off the plane and walked off. And, you know, of course, the flight attendant is kind of saying, why are you getting off the plane? I said, it's a long story, but I didn't schedule this flight, you know. But that's happened to people and people that can't get off. They don't have the luxury to get off the plane, that they don't have the money to pay for extra ticket, you know. And so that's one of the things that we recommended to the Department of Transportation that, you know, passengers should be able to be notified, you know, just like you get notified if your flight time changes, you should be notified if you're at the model plane changes you know sure yeah with being informed consumer which begs

the question for me it's such a cluster fuck between the airlines and between uh boeing and the governing bodies how would they fix all of this because there's so many planes in service i'm sure the airlines would lobby hard against grounding all these planes to implement whatever myriad fixes are necessary to really make them as airworthy as, uh, as they ought to be, especially to please someone like you. Like what do you, if you were in charge of it all, what, what would you do to make everything copacetic? Well, first of all, I'm not saying I have all the answers. Sure. But I would say, if I start with the Boeing company, you have to remove, you have to cut the head off the snake. I mean, you've got to get the C-suite people, new people, new ideas.

These people, the CEO, he's not new. I mean, even though people think he's new because he came in and the other CEO was fired after the max disasters, he was on the board for 10 years. Right. So that C-suite needs to go. They just don't get it, okay? And I had one question for the board of directors, for each of the board of directors, they need to ask themselves, in 2023, how many times did I, board member, actually spend time

in one of the Boeing factories and talk to the people that are making their planes, you know, because I guarantee you one day a walk in the factory is worth 50 PowerPoint presentations, right? So that's leadership right there. The Boeing company also should have to admit that they're having all these production quality issues. There are still production quality issues. I mean, we've seen issues with flight management computers failing. I know this isn't going to mean a lot to people that are not, you know, aviation people, but I think you'll get the gist. We've seen flight management computers failing regularly.

We've seen anti-icing systems failing regularly. That sounds essential. Yeah, well, also, isn't that anti-icing thing? I thought I just saw something where they are telling their pilots, like if the anti-icing thing is running for more than five minutes or something like that, it can lead to catastrophic failures on the plane or something crazy. And there's pilots who are putting sticky notes. with, you know, turned it off after five minutes and setting their iPhone timers. Is that, is that? Yeah, this is a world-class, you know, world-class airplane, right? You're putting sticky notes to remind yourself.

And what you're talking about, you're right. The pilots, we found out this in August. In August, they told us, they told, you know, through this very bureaucratic rulemaking process that produces documents like this, which you can't even read. There's this tiny, tiny, six-point font that nobody reads it if they have a life, you know, But us, retirees, you know, got nothing better to do, I guess. And we're looking at these things. We're finding out that, you know, the Boeing company knew about this, like, last year, you know, or earlier.

It remind me to tell you about the electrical problem that just came up within the last five days. But what happened is these, with the anti-icing system, they realized, even after this, even though this plane had been designed development for 10 years, we lose all those people. We had two fatal crashes. of a 20-month grueling, supposedly recertification by the FAA, they now tell us that the anti-icing system, which is a pretty important system on the plane, isn't working. And it could possibly, if the pilots leave the anti-icing system on

for more than five minutes in dry air, it could potentially disintegrate the composite material into the engine, causing the engine a catastrophic failure. And you're like, are you kidding me? I mean, and they're telling the pilots, you know, I mean, they're kind of busy up front. Those pilots are a little bit busy up there. Sure.

Remember whether they had turned it on in five minutes, there's no alert, there's no fault messages they get. And, you know, they're in and out of clouds. And how does that work when you're in, in, at night, anyhow, you're going to turn your landing lights on and fly with the landing lights on. And it's ridiculous that they're expecting this. And they tried to scoot this under without anybody knowing about it, you know. And they did some other things like that.

Recently, they've, they've requested engineering exemptions for everything from the stall management y'all dampener which is a computer in the back of the plane it alerts you to when you're if you are going to be in a stall to the flaps slats electronic actuator which actually controls the flaps i mean these are control surfaces on the plane there again this is important and they're actually asking for exemptions and receiving exemptions from from the f a on this what the fuck is the f a doing what what do they do like we actually while we're talking i got a great i got to let me show you one second guys I want to show you something.

Ooh. You just reminded me this. I had to show you this. After I testified to Congress, my daughter or a friend of ours found this thing. This is what was shown. I don't know who this cartoonist is, but let me see if you can see it. It's the FAA laying in bed going, this is your wake-up call, no, get off here. Oh, the phone is telling him to get off his lazy ass and do his job.

Jesus. Is it because there's a lot of former Boeing employees who've kind of like semi-retired into the FAA? You know, they've talked about that. That's called regulatory capture where they just kind of rotate in and they get a new another job. And then they come out and get a big job. So there's that. That's been a problem. But honestly, I think it's been the fact that they have lobbied successfully to have less oversight. Yeah. It's actually called organization delegation authority. and basically the engineering and in manufacturing as well, if you can believe it, instead of the FAA being there paying attention, they have a Boeing employee who's supposedly representing the FAA and the public interest.

But that person has to report up through a Boeing chain of command, supervisory chain. And so you put this person in a terrible position because here they are trying to point something out that's not safe or manufacturing is not correct, but they have to go up their own Boeing chain to make it happen. It's a complete utter failure. It's an absolute disaster.

It's something else we talked about in our meeting on Friday with the FAA administrator and the deputy. And, you know, it was initially sold that, hey, get out of the industry's way. You know, industry could do it better. Government get out of the way. Oh, yeah. It's just stupid. And it's proven to fail. We've lost, you know, we've had plane crashes, you know, all this kind of.

stuff and it all comes back to really horrible horrible oversight um and i'm not saying that you know f a people need to come in and tell boeing what to do but they need to be there enough in the presence so that Boeing employees knows that there's f a watching they are cognizant of what's being told last week we can't even keep up with this crap i'm not exactly last week last week we get another one of these, you know, notice a rulemaking government announcement that nobody's reading in six point font. And it says that the airplane has had, get this, that the Max airplanes, this happened like two days ago, actually. Max airplanes are uncommanded rolls. Like you're flying along and it just rolls suddenly unexpected, right? And what's causing this

is on the wings, there are these things called spoilers, which these little flaps that kind of pop up. You guys have seen them. Yeah. And the pilots use them when they're, you know, descending or trying to slow down. What's happening are these things are deploying in at altitude, right? Just randomly. And it's causing an upset of the plane.

Well, what they found in researching this is that they're finding that there's electrical wire bundles. And what electrical wire bundle is, imagine you got a spaghetti, noodles in a pot and you reached in with your hand you pulled it out right and you had a whole bunch this is what these wires look like they're heavy bundles these wires and these wire bundles are being chafed that they're called it's called chafing the wire bundles are being uh are routed incorrectly and they're routed over sharp edges and you know sharp edges on electrical wiring not a good thing sure and this is what's causing these planes that have uncommanded roles

and and we found out one of our engineers and the foundation found out that actually they've known about this since July of 2023 and they're just now coming out with it so this is it's just when you when you

when you factor in the safety incident reports that have been occurring you factor in all the engineering crap of you know sorry my language again of you know you know requesting exemptions you're asking pilots

do ridiculous operating procedures. You have criminal behavior. You have removals of quality control inspections. They removed, like I said, all these quality control inspections. These were really important. You know, you wouldn't want, like my friend Dan would say, you wouldn't want to buy a washing machine to find out that they removed a bunch of inspections on your washing machine. You sure as heck wouldn't want to get in a plane. Right. And remove these inspections without the FAA's knowledge. A lot of these inspections were removed. Thousands of inspections were removed. We have proof of this in documents now. They were, they were removed. FAA was completely unaware of it, if not for some Boeing whistleblowers who were courageous enough to bring it

forward. And the FAA took a couple months to investigate. And when they concluded was, yes, thank you very much. You're correct. We've substantiated your report. And I mean, the good news is they've added back a lot of these inspections, but here's the bad news. The really bad news is a couple hundred airplanes left Boeing factories without those thousands of inspections. And so you asked a question, you asked a question, what could be done, right? Everybody, that's a really good question. And besides the leadership change out, we have advocated our foundation feel so strongly that we think those planes need to be grounded now, right? We keep exasperating the problem. We keep pumping more planes out at the door and exasperating the problem. They need to be grounded. They need to do absolute

top the bottom thorough inspections. They need to get to all the bottoms of these failures that have occurring and decide if they could fix them or not. But continuing to deny these problems like an addict, you know, continuing to deny they exist and just happy, you know, just to get out of the news cycle and hope that travelers won't give it a second thought and won't, you know, and that's why consumers have to step forward and say, we're not putting up with it. You need to answer these questions you need to you need to take appropriate action nobody wants to lose another family member and uh sorry i'm i'm i drink some extra coffee just a little bit more i'm i'm extra scared with the new triple seven coming out because that's a that's like not twice the size of

the 737 but it's a fucking huge airplane and i just wonder what kind of shit's baked into that that's it's too far to to backtrack now because it sounds like there's just raw all the way down, between parts, between Spirit Aerosystems, which was spun off from Boeing in, like, 2005. Which now I think they want to buy back. Yeah, which would be a good move. Right. Because both, I'm sure you saw, both Spirit Aerosystems and Boeing just failed, like, the majority of their audits from the FAA. So it's like, I'm sure Boeing is terrified because this already over-engineered aircraft sounds like,

like it's got so many flaws within it that they've got to kind of not start from zero again, but they've got to re-engineer so many things, which then, as I'm sure you could tell me, has reverberating effects throughout the supply chain, throughout the manufacturing process, throughout all of the quality control things that would really set the company back, oh, God forbid, however many years, but just like communicate that shit to not only the public but to the investing public. Be forthcoming. Win back your good, great. the standing that you've got in in popular culture, whatever, that Boeing is a name you can trust by, like you said, getting the management out of there. Yeah. I mean, you have to, you have to clean

house and you have to be honest about these mistakes. I mean, we gave that presentation to the deputy secretary of transportation, because we also felt very strongly that DOT has been, you know, standing on the sidelines. I mean, they've been just, you know, I've written to Secretary Buttigieg four times at least, three or four times, no response, his assistance. And this problem, we happen on the previous Secretary of Transportation in the last administration. They just don't want to get involved in it, which is like, you know, one of our recommendations was that they actually create DOT, the federal government Department of Transportation under Mr. Buttigig. They create a standing task force right now to work

around the clock to answer these questions, like, what is going on? How bad is, you know, what does the FAA need to do? FAA is a subordinate agency of the DOT, right? And up until just this past weekend is really the first time I've heard Mr. Buttigieg go out and say, you know, we're going to, we're going to hold them accountable. It's like, you know, you need to hold yourself accountable. You have a lot of senior people that have paid a lot of money. And we told this to the DOT deputy that, you know, you guys are in a position where you're overseeing

the FAA. Don't keep waiting for Congress to do your job, because Congress has been, you know, having to extract information out of the FAA. You guys need to do your job and oversight the FAA and put a task force together, get to the bottom of all these issues. We identify like 35 problems, you know, and just you guys, not even the government. No, this is just a bunch of, you know, of us in our foundation, you know, a handful of people. Yeah. And so, and, and, and, and, and, and, And we're pretty confident that there's a lot more, but these are the big ones. And we wanted to come forward with solutions, too, not just to say, hey, you're all screwed up and here's a bunch of problems. We actually stepped forward and said, we've got recommendations here for you.

And we're happy to talk to you in more detail about this, you know, because we have some really talented people that are on our team. But, you know, it's unacceptable to be standing on the sidelines. You need to get in the game. You need to get your hands dirty. even if it might muddy your reputation a little bit and you got it, you got to get a good handle of what's going on. Now, we feel pretty good about the new administrator, Whitaker, Mr. Whitaker. He seems to be wanting to do the right thing, but we think that he's got an organization

that needs a lot of, you know, CPR, they need a lot of, or shock treatment because they've been very complacent, you know. While we're talking about the FAA and the regulators, was it the FAA or the DOT? Didn't they just issue in order to Boeing saying you guys have basically 90 days to shape up? Yes. The FAA got ordered Boeing. You have 90 days to put together a plan to tell us how you're going to improve the FAA told Boeing. You're going to have 90 days to tell us how you're going to produce production quality.

And what we just told DOT is you need to give the same order to the FAA. FAA, what are you doing to ensure production quality? No fucking kidding. Right, because that's my question. So they issue this order, right? What happens at the end of 90 days? You know, are we going to see anything other than a slap on the wrist for Boeing? Or, I mean, is that even too much to ask for at this point?

You guys are asking way too many good questions for guys that are all just a comedian. Because I'm like going, dang, I should have reviewed that. What, what, what, what the big part of the problem here is that, is that, it's all reactionary, right? So the steps that the FAA has taken, although to the general public may sound really impressive, oh, we're going to deploy, you know, we have 20 people doing an audit at the Boeing company. And those results came back and they're horrible.

I got news for you. No offense to those 20 people, but I had 30 years of aviation experience, flew in the military, and came into the factory. And it took me a good three months to just to be able to explain the basics of the build process. So I think they came in and probably did as great a job as you could ask for the time that they've had. But it's inadequate. You know, it's inadequate. They need more people there. They need to have those people need to be properly trained so they can understand how the plane is built. So for example, we'd bring in a new employee into our group

and that person would be, you know, we'd sit them down and say, okay, in this flow day, let's say it's flow day four where the wing and the body are joined together, right? In this flow day, here's the significant build process steps that have to occur. Here's the suppliers that provide parts for this flow day. Here's the inspections and tests that get done in this flow day. Here's how the sequence of the work is supposed to occur. So now you put an FAA person there, not to do the job of Boeing, but just to be in the vicinity.

They're going to hear people talking about, well, do you have your parts? Or do you have, you know, just forget that test. you know, move forward, you know, they're going to be there and they're going to say, whoa, time out a second. You can't be doing that. That's not how you're supposed to build planes. We gave you a production certificate and you told us that this was how are you going to build a planes.

A lot of these planes, I got news for you. They call this, this is a new term that I never heard, shadow factory. I'm like, what the hell is that? I asked my friend, what's that? He goes, well, because they're not building the plane in accordance with the approved plan by the FAA, the FAA gave them a certificate and said you're going to build a plane. and every flow day, this is what you're going to do and this is how you're going to test the plane

before it rolls out, completed. Well, because they're not building the plane correctly, they're having to build it out of sequence because the parts may not be there or the people are not, whatever. And then what happens is it goes out of the factory. It's not complete.

It's still not complete. It goes out of the factory and it's in the shadow of the factory, meaning it's on the, oh, I love the balloons. Yeah, you made the hands and it's the new feature. Continue, please. That was great. Please, please tell me if a cat head sits on my head.

Oh, we will. But anyhow, we're like, oh, these, this work is occurring outside the factory, right? And they're actually having large numbers of teams that are working out of factory because they can't build it properly. they're in such a rush to get planes pushed through the you know pushed them through the factory right that instead of stopping and building it right it's more about getting getting planes delivered and and so they're taking do these out of sequence work i think the new york times just did a story about this you know we we explain i explained it with congress you do this out of sequence work and what happens is the person who's supposed to let's say ben you're supposed to get your job done in flow day five but your parts aren't here you can't get it done that day. Also, I want to go home. You want to go home, right? You want to go home and your cohort crime shows up for his shift, but he can't start his work because you didn't finish yours. Well, then you wait a couple days and all of a sudden your parts show up, but guess what?

Ben, you got to go down to Flo Day 8 now, get that work done. And don't forget to come back to Flow Day 5 and get the work that you were supposed to get done today, right? And then that all gets backlogged. It's just a cascading disaster. You're hundreds of employees doing this. And that would make quality control an absolute nightmare rigmarole hence probably why a lot of it just gets skipped over i'm starting to kind of see a bigger picture here with all of this shit getting screwed up and out of sequence it's no wonder that quality control falls through the cracks if it happens at all yeah yeah there's there's a thing that um if you walk into the factory there's an area they call the mezzanine it's this gigantic walkway that you can look down on the

factory right and you know we bring all the visitors there so the news report and the VIPs, and they get a tour of the factory. They walk along this mezzanine. And when you're up at that height, it's like being in the city. And when you're at a certain point in a, say, a condo on the city, you can't hear the city noise. You know, you can't hear the street noise because you're just up high enough. The sound is attenuated.

But that's the same thing in the factory. So you walk in and you're like, wow, it looks pretty quiet and calm, right? But then if you went down, you know, 30 or 40 feet and got on the concrete floor, of the factory and walked around, you would hear the city. You would hear all the sounds of the employees that are expressing frustration because they can't get a quality inspector or their test equipment failed or, you know, the person's not available to know how to answer that question. And meanwhile, push, push, push, push, get the plane down the door.

And I know this is really terribly not, what's the word, not confidence-inspiring. what I'm telling you guys. And this is not how Bill Boeing wanted to build planes either, right? The company has been built on quality. Right. And, you know, kind of like these, right? You know, you wouldn't expect these to fail

and, you know, we become used to this high quality. That's what we should be expecting of airplanes, right? And that's what we've lost. And now we've accepted this substandard workmanship and it's good enough. And it's not good enough because people are getting on these planes. And so let's talk about that confidence for a bit because I'm sure we've spent, I don't know, however this past 45 minutes, maybe scaring the audience a bit. But I'm curious kind of where

you think this leads. I think, you know, Boeing's been having a bad go of it recently, but it and we haven't seen the, you know, catastrophic deaths that we've seen in 2018, but it seems like they're they're kind of skating by with it a little bit you know that alaskan airlines flight it's it's if they were just a bit higher people would have been sucked out if people didn't have their seatbelts buckled you know we're talking about people dead on that flight uh there was just another one in australia i don't think we know the exact cause yet but another bowing drop down yeah but i think you're talking about 50 people injured on that flight And so is this a ticking time bomb with Boeing planes?

I mean, you're talking about hundreds of planes going out without the correct quality control measures. Or, I mean, it's also hard to tell. It's one of the safest ways to travel still. I mean, you know, you're talking about we don't have, people generally feel pretty safe getting on a plane. And we don't have like massive death toll to maybe back up this kind of like alarm. Yeah, I just want to piggyback that. Sorry, because, I mean, we've talked a lot about the 737, and my question was going to be, is it getting to the point where we should be concerned? Because I know you've said you'd be fine getting on any kind of legacy Boeing aircraft, like a triple seven or the older 737s or any number of other planes.

But now, I mean, with all of this shit going on, it's clear that the fault doesn't just lie with Boeing, which it absolutely does. but in part, but the airlines as well and their shoddy maintenance in pursuit of the same exact corporate greed and ever higher margins and profits. Yeah, but we're talking about brand new planes. Oh, yeah. Experiencing these. Right. Yeah.

You know, you guys, I'm going to just kind of hit each one because, you know, air travel should be the safest form of travel, right? It's supposed to be. And it historically has been that way. and you know myself and my family travel and we still have to travel in the midst of all this right but what these are what these are i would say are unnecessary risk like it's one thing if you have to fly and end up in bad weather you know something happens and you end up flying through bad weather you know that's understandable that that kind of thing might happen you maybe you didn't see the

weather on the radar or whatever but these are preventable risk like these are you know and these airplanes have to last 30 years or more, right? That's what they're designed to last. So, so you have planes that are brand new that are coming out the out, out the building with, with problems. I mean, all, all your alarms have to start going off and say, this is, this is not normal, right? This is not, this is abnormal and we need to do something. And it is, and you asked the question about a thinking time bomb, that comment, that exact phrase has been used with victim families who feel like, you know, and this is what motivates us because we're like, You know, I haven't been able to really, you know, confidently get a great night's sleep, you know, ever since I worked in the factory. Even though I flew in the military, I was never uncomfortable, you know, like I am now with what I know.

So I think that you shouldn't have to worry about these problems. You should absolutely be able to get your latte and, you know, and get on the plane and put your bags and, you know, put your feet up and, you know, watch entertainment or whatever. but we've gotten lazy, we've gotten complacent, we've gotten acclimated, we have flight crews that are seeing repeat failures, and instead of saying, wait a minute, this is completely unacceptable, they're like, well, you know, it failed the last time, you know, and it just happens, you know, it's unacceptable because when you look at accident investigations and you study accident investigations and you look back, there's, there's some things that actually happen and they're called precursors. And almost every accident, if you go back, you find out that there was problems with that airplane prior. There was problems. You know, the Ethiopian plane, the ET302 plane also had uncommanded roles at low altitude. There are indicators of potential problems. And if the airlines are, like you said, wishing to get the planes out the door because they're making money on this, right? They don't make money when the planes aren't flying, really.

They're a part of the problem, right? If they have a problem with maintenance of system failure, and what we're seeing is they fix it, and then it recurs, and they fix it and it recurs. And a lot of that is because they're not getting to the root cause, which is partly a big responsibility to the FAA. There's a whole program where they're supposed to work with the manufacturer and the airlines to get to the bottom of these problems.

So, yeah, people do feel like it's a taking time on them. I got to tell you that I have that sense, my in my stomach. And that's why I wrote to the letter of Alaska. And we wrote that report in September. So we, but this is all avoidable. And what I want to leave you guys on the positive note. Okay. I'm going to go back into coach mode here if I can. Here's the positive note. We have incredible people that are capable of building incredible airplanes. And there are people that are capable of operating and maintaining these incredible airplanes. This is all we've done this.

We know how to do this. But we have to be honest when we see something that's not right. We got to fix it. We can't just accept it and try to ignore it and then just play, you know, play, play, you know, roulette. It's not how we should do business. And over time, these things can bite you. And the pilots will tell you that if they,

They have one emergency. I've never met a pilot my whole life, never. You said, hey, if you have this emergency, can you handle it? Oh, yeah, I'll grab my checklist and I'll talk to my co-pilot. And, you know, if I have to get assistance from the flight attendants, you know, we'll do whatever we've got to do to deal with the problem. Well, what happens if you have two emergencies simultaneously or three? Or what happens if you're in bad weather and you're landing and there's a lot of traffic?

You know, there's other factors here or you're tired. And by the way, most pilots, when they fly with each other, that may be the first and only time they've worked with that other person. Because it's not like a military, you know, where you get to know your peers. These individuals are professionals and they do great work. But these pilots should not be exposed to these kinds of unnecessary risk. And that's what we're trying to do. And, you know, you'll hear people say, and I've heard this over and over again, like Boeing was saying this, the max airplane has flown

you know six million miles successfully you know no problems right you guys have all heard this yeah it's the most scrutinized plane in history 100% safe yeah yeah well those millions of miles tell you nothing about the individual quality of individual planes

every airplane like your vehicle is unique when it was made how it's operated how it's maintained and you guys can you can imagine that there are airplanes out there that are highly you know maintained and they're they're operating and then there's some that are not. And so millions of miles flown safely is really a worn out,

outdated statistic. It tells you nothing about the individual quality of these planes. Another comment you'll hear is, well, the max airplane has had 98% dispatch reliability, which means that it's gotten off the ground 98% of the time on time. Well, that's not a measure of safety. In fact, Lionair Flight 610 and Ethiopian Flight 302 had 100% dispatch reliability as my friend Joe would tell you. So we're talking about mitigating risk, right, reducing unnecessary risk. And that's, and so that's what I'm trying to get to you guys. That's what I'm trying to share with people is that these are unnecessary. These are things that are fixable, but not with the current, not in the current environment. Right. And that brings, I, we should, I guess we should probably

get close to wrapping it up. Yeah. One, one big question I'd like, to ask, just to dovetail off of that, is, is there anything that we can do as members of the flying public to push these companies to once again prioritize safety and quality over profit? Like, I'm sure that there's congressmen or congresspeople we could contact. Like, what is there that we can do besides just canceling flights or rescheduling flights? Well, that's a great question. A couple of things. I mean, ultimately you guys, the consumers, have ultimate power even more than anybody.

You know, you can do what a lot of people are doing and they're scheduling themselves away from the max airplane, right? That's one thing. Another thing they could do is demand the Congress and the Department of Transportation alert people to when their airplane models change because that'll put an immediate fix to this chronic shuffling that occurs, you know, and people get, you know, forced to fly a plane that they don't want to fly. I think put in pressure on the Department of Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to actually really thoughtfully, comprehensively go in and try to find out what's wrong. And that's why I'm advocating for a round-the-clock task force and really, you know, really spend some time and energy on it. I think another thing that could be done is you guys can talk. We can talk about it and ask hard.

questions and I think sometimes they don't want to answer them you know when we went in and gave this presentation to f a and d o t we went in there very consciously with with the goal of not getting distracted and going off on a bunny trail on any one of these problems we could have stopped and talked for hours on you know we're like no what we're trying to do is we're trying to transmit to you that these are problems these are real problems you're duly informed you cannot claim you know plausible deniability and so yes they can also call their legislators and and there's two groups to legislators that they should focus on. One are the congressmen and women who work on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. That's Congressman Graves Committee. And the other one

is the Senate Commerce Science and Science Commerce and Transportation Committee. That is Senator Cantwell on the Democrat side and Senator Cruz on the Republican side. Those two committees provide oversight of the executive branch agencies like DOT and FAA. And then the other thing is, you know, tell, you know, don't buy stock, right? I mean, don't, don't buy stock in a company that is not doing the right thing. That's my opinion. Those are things that people have, you know, you guys, we all have more power than we may be realized.

And until that happens, and the last thing I should say is there's accountability, the criminal accountability that needs to happen. Boeing signed this deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice. And that agreement was a three-year agreement. If they kept their nose clean, they could go ahead and actually, there would be no criminal charges to the executives

because they were not being charged on an individual basis. But now the courts are revisiting this because the belief is that, that at the families, they never got their victims' rights. They were never consulted. And so now they're trying to pursue additional criminal investigation. And so, you know, we should demand that the Department of Justice and the FBI actually go out and investigate this, you know. I've written, personally written a 20-page letter to a DOJ official outlying what I felt were criminal behavior. And we just, our foundation, just sent a seven-page letter to the judge in Texas outlining what we think is evidence of failing to comply with the terms of the DPA.

And, you know, you start holding some of these corporate executives accountable for what some family members have called corporate homicide. You start holding these people accountable for what they're doing. And all of a sudden, things will change. A lot of people will say, I don't want to be that person. not worth it to me to do that. And so there's a lot that can be done here. There's a lot of solutions. It's not hopeless. But it isn't going to get better just if we sit and stick our head in the sand. Yeah. Oh, man. Well, I'm going to Hawaii in a couple weeks on a 737. So I'm going to see what I can do there. Yeah, like I said, I'm sorry to have to say this.

Don't be sorry. I'm so grateful to you for what you're doing and what your foundation is doing. I mean, without you, who knows, I mean, we've seen what happens when you leave these people in these institutions and companies to their own devices. And, yeah, we, we the consumer, the flying public just get. The loser consumer. Yeah, the loser consumer, as we call ourselves. We just get the shaft every time. Yeah.

But so where can people find you? You've got a podcast. you've got your foundation anything you'd like to plug um you know i wasn't i yeah i mean we have the foundation for aviation safety um it's foundation for aviation safety dot org it's it's a new foundation you know it's not we're not like obviously the people in the foundation have been working this for a while but the foundation is new and again our objective is just to shed a light on on this stuff you know that's that's that's that's all we want to do we want to do with that gentleman we lost his family said um and then

then, you know, I have a podcast called Warning Bells. I'm not a professional podcaster. I don't know if you guys can sit. You guys are way more polished than me. Yeah, man, you're doing great. Well, you know, I never envisioned being a podcast host, but we just created that because we thought it was important to get the word out to the public. So, you know, feel free to listen to that. And we're getting good feedback on that. And then, yeah, that's about it. I mean, you know, I think the one message I want to leave you guys with is that a lot of people died and these family members are still fighting and they deserve our support, you know, because they're right. They've been right all along. Right.

Well said. Ed, we thank you so much for your time and for everything that you're doing. Yeah, we really appreciate you coming on and fighting for people's safety. Yeah. It's very important, unlike us who make, you know, dick and dick jokes and stuff. Yeah, but what you guys are doing, honestly, it's kind of like the John Oliver show. If you've seen the John Oliver show, if you've seen the latest one, he did on Boeing, it's, it was, they did a great job. I mean, it's dark humor and, you know, but it's effective because it educates people and what's happening.

So anyhow, thank you guys for what you're doing. it is really important what you're doing and even if you're doing it with the smile on your face it's important to get the word out that's right all right ed thank you so much for your time we really appreciate it thank you guys have a great day all right take care do i damn it oh i think he was going to say do i need to do anything no you don't no you don't i'm sure oh dang do i should i i shouldn't have just ended the thing. I shouldn't have just ended it. I should have been like, okay, yeah, and we'll cut right there. Jeez. He's Louise. Oh, man. Do I need... Ed, uh, he was great. Oh, man. Well,

but anyway, folks, um, join us in the, in the bonus episode. If you, if you've, uh, enjoyed this episode, you'll be sure to enjoy a lot more brevity in there. Uh, Ben and Meal Show. Brevity or levity? Levity. Fuck! What's brevity then? Brevity is bread. Brevity's beans, dude. Brevity is when the bread rises. Wouldn't brevity be the... I don't know. The short... I'm Googling brevity.

I don't know. Either way, we're putting levity and brevity, the beans, whatever. Yeah, brevity is concise and exact use of words. Okay. You are using brevity to correct me here in that I should have said levity. There we go. If you guys want to bring some brevity to your life, join us at ben and ameelshow.com. Yeah.

All right. So long, everybody.