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

by Peter Robison

Jon Tester offered what sounded like the hard truth of a country-and-western song. “Probably a painful morning for you but the fact is, it’s infinitely more painful for the folks that are sittin’ a couple of rows behind you,” he said, before giving the knife a final twist. “I would walk before I was to get on a 737 MAX,” he said. “I would walk. There’s no way.”

Muilenburg knew the plane was flawed, Njoroge told him, and still he blamed foreign pilots; he hadn’t seen the victims in Ethiopia and Indonesia as people just like his own children. “They’re not human beings to you,”

Representatives pressed Muilenburg to resign. “You’re the captain of this ship,” Congressman Jesús García of Illinois said. “Cultural negligence, incompetence, or corruption starts at the top and it starts with you.”

In 2019, some former Boeing engineers had been called to a rented office in a strip mall near a Hobby Lobby, not far from the factory in Everett, to answer questions from FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers assessing a potential criminal fraud on regulators.

One alternative on the table was shutting down one of the last well-functioning parts of Boeing’s battered commercial aircraft operation—the giant plant in Everett, Washington, that had helped produce a record number of Dreamliners the previous year.

Boeing left the Everett plant open while cleaners wiped down handrails and set up hand sanitizer stations.

At another point in the conversation, he implied that the pilots from Indonesia and Ethiopia, “where pilots don’t have anywhere near the experience that they have here in the U.S.,” were part of the problem too. Asked whether he believed American pilots would have been able to handle a malfunction of the software, Calhoun asked to speak off the record. “Forget it,” he said, when the reporters refused. “You can guess the answer.” As for the larger message about Boeing’s own culture: “I see a couple of people who wrote horrible emails.”

As the families had wished, no one from Boeing was at the memorial,

Boeing’s Puget Sound–area managers got expanded authority to let office workers stay home, while the production team kept coming into the Everett plant. The machinists warily eyed each other, some in masks, others not.

At least twice, ambulances appeared in the huge open bays of the Everett factory taking away workers who’d fallen sick; their sections were cleaned and work continued.

Everett remained open. Boeing finally said it would shut the plant five days later, a day after a fifty-seven-year-old worker there died from the coronavirus and his family sent out a plea for its closure over Facebook.

plans to cut 19,000 of Boeing’s 160,000 jobs and consolidate production of larger jetliners either in Everett or in South Carolina.

Most significantly, they preserved the BASOO, the group created by Ali Bahrami that had arrayed just forty FAA staffers against fifteen hundred at Boeing.

he’d be fired if Boeing sold a single airplane to an unsafe airline. The phrasing, again, suggested an inability to accept the need to stamp out unsafe practices at Boeing itself.

The unit of technical pilots where Mark Forkner had worked was moved into the same organization with the test pilots, an attempt to keep them in the loop and prevent communications breakdowns like those on the MAX.

Boeing’s engineers, too, began reporting directly to a vice presi...

The CEO and his board considered writing minimum safety standards into Boeing’s contracts, according to someone apprised of the deliberations. There would also be a formal mechanism for pilots to report any safety concerns they encountered while instructing airlines in the field.

As part of a new cadre of “Global Engagement Pilots,” Boeing hired 160 to fly with airlines reintroducing the MAX, embedding them for thirty-five-day assignments at an equivalent annual salary of $200,000. They came from Cambridge Communications, the pilot recruitment company based in the Isle of Man—more of the “dirtbag contractors” whose hiring had so infuriated Boeing’s longtime pilots and, in a way, helped create the bad feelings and lousy communications loop that contributed to the whole mess.

The effort was led by Carl Davis, Forkner’s former boss, who doubled down on a strategy to remove the union-represented pilots who had flown in the field with customers. The last seven were laid off in September. “The loss of this critical coordinating function between the Boeing employees who design and manufacture aircraft and the customer air crews who fly them is incalculable,” said Ray Goforth, executive director of the engineers’ union. “For customers and regulators, the face of Boeing will now be contractors masquerading as genuine Boeing pilots.”

In October, Calhoun chose South Carolina for its wide-body jetliner operations, completing the decade-long exodus to the nonunion South.

The last of the 747s built by the “Incredibles” at Joe Sutter’s Everett factory will roll off the lines in 2022,

Many people in the industry—and especially at Boeing—still believe the twenty-month grounding was an overreaction, Boeing the fall guy for lousy overseas pilots and sanctimonious whistleblowers. One of the most pointed comments to the final Airworthiness Directive published by the FAA came from an American Airlines pilot: “Interesting that none of the three major airlines had any problems with MCAS. Let’s get her back in the AIR!”

They believe the families got less than they could have, victims of a system that treats the lives of people in Indonesia and other developing countries as inherently less valuable.

In the view of some of the engineers who know the plane best, who can picture its systems just as clearly as the wires and pipes in an old basement, not enough has been done to fix what might go wrong. “With its unique systems design, the 737 operates in some scenarios at reduced safety margins compared to modern aircraft,” as one Boeing employee, less eager to get the plane back up in the air, wrote in his own comments to the FAA.

That person was Curtis Ewbank, the young engineer who had tried to get his bosses to listen to his concerns about the MAX’s design, quit in frustration, and eventually rejoined Boeing. His comments painstakingly laid out the scenarios where the plane is lacking. The rudder cables remain vulnerable to engine shrapnel, the issue that thirteen FAA specialists wanted fixed before they were overridden by managers. In a jam of the elevator system, the crew is expected to “literally learn on the fly,” while reading notes from the checklist—something pilots don’t train for in a simulator, he said. Some of the cockpit alerts, he added, leave the crew to interpret and deal with erroneous information instead of removing it automatically as in a more modern design; the MAX remains the only large commercial airliner without an electronic checklist to guide pilots.

By many accounts, a cultural reckoning like the one that followed the Challenger disaster never took place at Boeing and its regulator.

Keith Leverkuhn, the MAX’s program manager, told the House investigators he would consider the program a success.

Conceived in haste to avoid losing market share, the MAX ended up putting Boeing into the deepest hole in its history. The American export champion delivered 157 planes in 2020 compared to 566 for Airbus. Even by one of its own design ambitions—avoiding simulator training—the MAX was a failure.

Meant to cost $2.5 billion—a simple derivative of a model updated a dozen times since the 1960s—the MAX easily exceeded the $20 billion Boeing might have spent on an all-new program. The direct cost was $21 billion, including compensation to customers, aircraft storage, pilot training, and settlements to the families. Through the end of 2020, more than six hundred MAX orders had been canceled, a loss of another $33 billion at typical selling prices. If buyers don’t return, the Boeing MAX debacle could approach the more than $65 billion that BP lost in the Deepwater Horizon blowout, the most expensive corporate disaster in history.

Yet the people who made the most damaging decisions, and laid on the impossible demands, kept rising to the top. Like Jack Welch’s General Electric before it, Boeing became a collection of assets to be shuffled as managers saw fit to make the most beneficial combination for stockholders, not for customers or employees.

The amount of the criminal penalty was only $243.6 million, which, as the complaint noted, was about what it would have cost Boeing to let MAX pilots train in a simulator in the first place.

Like Calhoun, the government saw a couple of pilots who wrote horrible emails. The only people cited in the complaint were the two 737 technical pilots, Mark Forkner and Patrik Gustavsson, though not by name. To their coworkers, it was bizarre that the managers—men who heaped on the pressure, reaped the rewards, and then disappeared when the whole deadly blunder was exposed—never paid any price.

Boeing got away with murder.