The Worst 7 Years in Boeing’s History—and the Man Who Won’t Stop Fighting for Answers

US airplane manufacturer Boeing has long been in competition to sell more commercial airplanes than European rival Airbus. But what happens when one of your airplanes, in this case the 737 Max, sells so well and so quickly that manufacturing is overwhelmed and can’t keep up? According to Ed Pierson, a former factory manager turned whistleblower, putting schedule position over quality has lead to catastrophic results. For Wired, Lauren Smiley profiles one man in relentless pursuit of the truth.

He thought about something his dad always said: People lie; follow the evidence.

At this point, it was widely reported that the cause of the crashes was a series of events triggered by faulty angle-of-attack sensors. Mounted on the plane’s nose, these sensors calculated the angle of the wings to the oncoming air. The devices were made by another aerospace company, and Boeing workers normally installed and tested them in Renton. Each Max had two sensors, but Boeing designed the system so that only one sensor fed data into the flight control computer at a time. In the minutes leading up to both crashes, that lone sensor had failed; it gave the pilots a false reading that the plane was angling sharply upward. That reading repeatedly triggered a software system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System. To prevent the plane from stalling if it were actually angled dangerously upward, MCAS automatically pitched the plane’s nose down. Pilots on both flights fought the automatic system in a chaotic tug of war before finally losing control.