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

by Peter Robison

By chance, this crew had an advantage that pilots Suneja and Harvino would not when they stepped into the very same plane, only hours later. A third, off-duty pilot was sitting in the jump seat between the two at the controls, hitching a ride. In the commotion he noticed the trim wheel between them moving. That suggested to him the proper checklist, among the dozens in the handbook—the one for a runaway stabilizer. The captain flipped a switch to turn off the stabilizer motor, just as Boeing engineers had reasoned a pilot would. For the rest of the flight, he had to turn the wheel himself, a remarkably rustic thing to ask of a pilot of a large commercial aircraft in the twenty-first century. The control column also kept vibrating in his hand; there was no mechanism in the MAX to shut off the stick shaker if the data were faulty. But the crew managed to land safely in Jakarta ninety minutes later.