Former Boeing employee Ed Pierson made the claim during an appearance at a Senate hearing about Boeing's recent safety issues.
Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
A Boeing whistleblower said there is a "criminal coverup" surrounding January's Alaska Airlines blowout.
Ed Pierson was one of four people who testified Wednesday in front of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Pierson was a senior manager at Boeing's 737 factory and retired in 2018, before the first Max 8 crash.
He has consistently raised concerns that the narrowbody jet is unsafe and says he once got off a 737 Max before it took off when he realized which plane model he had boarded.
Pierson's testimony on Wednesday included a significant fresh allegation about the Alaska Airlines blowout investigation. "I'm not gonna sugarcoat this, this is a criminal coverup," he said.
After a 737 Max 9 lost its door plug in midair — leaving a gaping hole in the fuselage — the National Transportation Safety Board said key bolts designed to secure it were missing.
The NTSB said the door plug had been removed in Boeing's factory to fix some broken rivets, but the planemaker told investigators it didn't have documentation of this work.
"With respect to documentation, if the door plug removal was undocumented there would be no documentation to share," Boeing said in a statement last month.
But Pierson said on Wednesday: "Records do in fact exist. I know this because I personally passed them to the FBI."
Asked for more detail about this by Ranking Member Ron Johnson, Pierson said an "internal whistleblower" sent him the documents about the work done on the door plug.
"For the last couple months, there's been talk that there's no records, and that's obviously not the case," Pierson added. "It has been available for months."
The FBI is looking into whether criminal charges should be brought against Boeing as a result of the blowout. Passengers on the Alaska Airlines flight were sent letters from the FBI saying that they might be victims of a crime.
The embattled planemaker has seen its stock fall by a third since the start of the year, per Markets Insider data.
Citing people familiar with the situation, The Seattle Times reported that Pierson was referring to an informal database used to track problems at the 737 Max factory, called the shipside action tracker.
Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the NTSB, told FlightGlobal: "I believe the whistleblower has the shipside tracker, which we already have, [and] is not the documents we are looking for."
Boeing did not comment directly on Pierson's remarks when reached by Business Insider. In a statement about its safety culture, the planemaker said: "Since 2020, Boeing has taken important steps to foster a safety culture that empowers and encourages all employees to raise their voice."
"We continue to put safety and quality above all else and share information transparently with our regulator, customers and other stakeholders," it added.
