Lauren Smiley
On a sticky hot morning in July, Ed Pierson steps into the lobby of a hotel in Washington, DC, completely unwilling to obey the plane-crash life cycle. You’ve seen it: An awful crash dominates the news. The loss of lives is so vastly unjust. Serious investigators look into the causes and issue a report. Regulators and lawmakers hatch reforms. Passengers start to forget. Most of us get back on the plane.
Pierson—a strapping 62-year-old with a shaved head and rocket-launch levels of energy—does not accept any of it. Instead, he is executing the Ed Pierson plan. He perches on a couch in this lobby, to explain the day’s play:
Pierson will walk into a series of federal buildings without an appointment. In front of the security guards (with his wife and me alongside), he will announce that he is a Boeing whistleblower. He’ll spare the guards the very long, personal story of guilt, obsession, and sacrifice that led him here. He won’t have much time to say that, for years, he’s been talking with these agencies about Boeing’s 737 Max. But he’ll explain that the manila envelope he’s pulling from his backpack, the bag embroidered with a little football and a B for Bainbridge High School, holds internal Boeing documents that he wants to deliver right now—in person—to a top dog in the building.
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