After the October hearing, the families joined Pierson and Jacobsen at a Mexican restaurant. A boom mic from a documentary crew hovered above Pierson’s head. Jacobsen pulled out a suitcase from under the table, and Pierson handed out glass awards, from their foundation, honoring the families’ leadership on aviation safety. Pierson improvised a speech for each one.
Chris Moore thought, well, this was unexpected. “You don’t think, oh, I can’t wait to get an award someday.” But at this point in the awful five-year battle that he never wanted, “shaking my fist at the clouds,” as he put it, a token for the Zoom group’s efforts felt nice. Moore knows that all this fact-finding and accountability-seeking serves another purpose, too: to help protect him from his bottomless grief.
Pierson still wrestles with his own grief, a wholly different kind. Could he have done more to prevent the crashes? “I don’t think I’ll ever—” He lets out a long exhale. “I’ll ever stop feeling that way.”
Listening, I thought about something Doug Pasternak, the lead investigator of the Max report, told me about his conversations with Pierson. “He was devastated. He did have a sense of, ‘guilt’ may not be the word, but responsibility. He just wishes there was something that could have been done to prevent these horrific accidents.”
Pierson couldn’t prevent the crashes, although no one I spoke to thought he could have done more. But he could become the guy hellbent on not letting another Max fall from the sky. He could hunch over every report to work out possible explanations in an RV kitchenette. He could be the fired-up guy pushing authorities to look—no really, look—under every last Boeing rock. If a corporate and regulatory culture of yes-men and -women led to the deaths of 346 people, then Pierson will happily be the nope man, awarding no benefit of the doubt.
The new documents, with all their promise of bringing home Pierson’s contested electrical theory, ended up amounting to less than he’d hoped. The NTSB told Pierson it wouldn’t hand the papers to the Max crash investigators—the cases had concluded, the board said—but he could do so himself.
Boeing wobbles in limbo, before civil and criminal courts, at the FAA, in Congress, awaiting the final door-plug report from the NTSB. Observers say 2025 will be Boeing’s pivotal year: The company either turns around under its new CEO or succumbs to a doom loop. Pierson vows to keep talking.
“For me, it was always about not allowing them to shut me up,” he says. Recently, the foundation received its first donations and now has a payroll. They’re starting to monitor other aircraft models and are talking with a university about analyzing industry-wide data—“to be an equal-opportunity pain in the butt,” Pierson says. The guy Boeing surely hoped would go away by now has, instead, institutionalized himself to stick around.
When Pierson said goodbye to me in DC, his parting words were: “Don’t fly the Max.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. That’s exactly what I was booked on, the 7:41 pm from Dulles to San Francisco. It was the one I could catch after the whistleblower event on Capitol Hill and still walk into my house that night. Commercial flight was supposed to be about convenience, after all, collapsing a country’s span into a Tuesday night commute. At this point in aviation history, we passengers should be able to pick a flight on time alone.
Hurtling through the air that evening in seat 10C, I read the US House committee’s Max investigation, a disruptor of illusions. Like many fliers, I’d long ago made my bargain with risk. I’d taken comfort in statistics, summoned faith in the engineers and assembly workers, the pilots, the system. I’d shunted away the knowledge—paralyzing, if you let it in—that stepping on an airplane is an extraordinary act of trust. Deep in the report, I reached the part about a senior manager at Boeing’s factory in Renton, a guy named Ed Pierson, who seemingly knew what we all know when we soothe ourselves by thinking, They wouldn’t let it fly if it weren’t safe. We’re all relying on someone to be the “they.”
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