Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

by Peter Robison

There was another reason for the reluctance to push back against Boeing’s stated assumptions—one that involved race, not cost. The empathy that Boeing’s aviators might have had for a pilot who looked like them wasn’t being extended to Suneja and Harvino. Conversations at Boeing kept focusing on how Harvino, once he took over the controls, hadn’t been able to trim the plane with the thumb switch. Boeing’s pilots, predominantly older white men, had long had private jokes about the incompetent crews they ran into overseas. “Too dumb to spell 737,” went a frequent refrain of one pilot. Another trainer would ask rhetorically if “Chung Fo Ho” could handle a certain procedure.

It was Lent, so Nadia and Michael, who are Orthodox Christian, took comfort in the services taking place every day in the majority Orthodox country. Strangers came up to them and grabbed their hands and bent their heads and cried. A muscular guy in a tight T-shirt who sold them black stone crosses wept when he heard why they were buying them. That Sunday, mourners marched in the hundreds past the Library of Parliament in Addis Ababa to Selassie Cathedral, all in black or the sea-green uniforms of Ethiopian Airlines. Many carried photos of the dead, the scene gaining unearthly power from its complete silence. In the cathedral, after a priest read the victims’ names aloud, the group carried empty coffins outside to a graveyard. The only sounds were sobbing, wailing, and chanting. All over the world, thousands gathered in the months that followed to say goodbye to their husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, lovers, friends, and coworkers.

Two brothers in California, Melvin and Bennett Riffel, had been on a last adventure together before Melvin’s wife, Brittney, was due to have their baby. A thousand people mourned them at the St. Joseph Catholic Church in Redding, California, many joining a spirited wake afterward at the Redding Elks Lodge. A few men came in Hawaiian shirts like those Melvin had worn, and one couple wore shirts printed with the brothers’ pictures. “Like I always told the boys—life isn’t always fair and sometimes it will knock you on your butt,” their father, Ike Riffel, told people at the Elks Lodge. “Let the healing begin. Let’s get up. Let’s start throwing punches.” Brittney’s baby, born two months later, was a girl.

Thirty years after the 1986 Challenger disaster, an engineer at Morton Thiokol, the firm that had designed the shuttle’s infamous O-rings, called one of his former managers. Bob Ebeling was eighty-nine now, and in hospice. Before the infamous launch, both had tried to alert NASA to the risks the Challenger faced, to no avail. Nearing death, Ebeling told the former manager, Allan McDonald, that he’d never stopped replaying the events of the tragedy in his head. He wished he’d made his case better. He asked why God had chosen a loser like him for such an important job. “I said, ‘Bob, a loser is a person who does nothing,’ ” McDonald recalled. “You did something and you really cared.” McDonald went on to write a book, Truth, Lies, and O-Rings, about the lessons to be drawn from the disaster. He lectured at universities and tried to get engineering schools to make courses in ethics a requirement of graduation. By many accounts, a cultural reckoning like the one that followed the Challenger disaster never took place at Boeing and its regulator.