“I would absolutely not fly a Max airplane,” said Ed Pierson, a former Boeing senior manager. “I’ve worked in the factory where they were built, and I saw the pressure employees were under to rush the planes out the door. I tried to get them to shut down before the first crash.”

“I would tell my family to avoid the Max. I would tell everyone, really,” said Joe Jacobsen, a former engineer at Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration. …

Jacobsen, the former FAA engineer, said that allowing the planes to fly again was “premature,” noting that he and other safety advocates have been sounding the alarm about numerous safety problems on both the Max 8 and Max 9 for years.

“Instead of fixing one problem at a time and then waiting for the next one, fix all of them,” Jacobsen said. He compared it to playing whack-a-mole, waiting for the next problem to pop up: “Maybe it’s a week. Maybe it’s a month.”

[Good advice. Why isn’t the FAA taking it, though, and forcing Boeing to do just that? — Ed]