January 25, 2021 at 10:23 am
Boeing 737 Max airplanes sit parked at the company's production facility on November 18, 2020 in Renton, Washington. (Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)
Is the Boeing 737 MAX safe? That is the question that passengers are still asking as airlines start to return the troubled jet back to service. A new whistleblower report is out, and it suggests the plane is not ready to be back in the air.
That report comes from former Boeing senior manager Ed Pierson, who testified as a whistleblower before Congress in 2019 during the MAX crash hearings.
His new report casts doubt on the flight control system, know as MCAS, as the major problem with the two crashes. While it did contribute to the crashes, Pierson believes problems with the electrical system as a whole, and potential defects in the “angle of attack” sensor might be more to blame. These are issues, Pierson wrote, that have yet to be addressed.