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Finally, he was asked to say plainly why the FAA had only issued an advisory to pilots and given Boeing months to modify the MCAS software, when its own internal assessment found such a high risk of another incident. This time he gave a fuller answer, before trailing off into one more process. “We knew that [the] eventual solution would be to have the modification and based on our risk assessment, we felt that this, that we have sufficient time to be able to do the modification, ah, you know, and get the final fix,” he said. “Which—what that means typically—we refer to it as ‘closing
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In Massachusetts, Nadia Milleron couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She read the transcript again and again. He had just described with infuriating nonchalance how the FAA’s “processes” had killed her daughter. It was noxious gaslighting of the kind then emanating from the White House every day.
Tor asked him if there was anything he’d learned from the accidents or wished he could have done differently. He said he couldn’t think of anything. They left the office more enraged than ever.
They soon found another issue—rags and other debris left in the fuel tanks, a sign of the hasty production ramp-up.
They included the pilot’s venting in which he appeared to be saying that he had trouble controlling the plane in a simulator after MCAS fired, and that he had unwittingly lied to regulators about how the system worked. Boeing sent the same batch of documents to the new administrator of the FAA, Stephen Dickson, another former airline pilot.
“This is the smoking gun,” DeFazio said.
Visiting the crash site in Ethiopia that October, Nadia and her son spotted bones washed up by recent rains.
Muilenburg’s eyes were wet, his features working painfully. Keating, sitting directly behind him, kept chewing gum, his expression suggesting he was watching an especially interesting movie. “When did you become aware of the fact that MCAS was not going to be included in the flying manual?” Blumenthal asked him. It was a kill shot for an opening question—this was, of course, the thing Muilenburg had lied about on Fox Business soon after the Lion Air crash, telling people MCAS was in the manual. The CEO looked down and said, “First if I could express my deep sympathies…” Blumenthal, a seasoned
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He explained that in a sixteen-hundred-page manual, MCAS was mentioned only once—in the glossary, a pattern of deliberate concealment. “So when Boeing came to us and said it’s the pilots, you were lying to us as well,” the senator said. “Would you agree that this system of oversight is absolutely broken—that’s the lesson here, isn’t it? That Boeing lobbied the Congress for more delegation and now we have to reverse that delegation authority?”
After two and a half hours, Muilenburg got up to leave, eyes cast down. Nadia Milleron was a few feet away. “Turn and look at people when you say you’re sorry,” she blurted out. He stopped and turned, holding his body stiffly, knowing he was still on camera, and said clearly to her, maintaining his gaze: “I’m sorry.”
Paul Njoroge brought pictures of four coffins instead of the faces of his wife, Caroline, and their children, Ryan, Kelli, and Rubi. 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,” Njoroge said, “so you can only see their coffins.”
On January 30, Samya’s father, Michael Stumo, met with Ken Feinberg, the lawyer distributing the Boeing funds, for a get-acquainted lunch at the Willard Hotel in Washington.
It could hardly have started more awkwardly. As they headed for the elevator, Stumo mentioned that his daughter had actually met Feinberg once, at a UMass alumni event in 2017. The famous mediator preened. “Oh yeah, I remember that speech—how’s your daughter?” he asked automatically. “She’s fifty feet under the ground in Addis Ababa,” Stumo answered tersely.
Feinberg continued as if he hadn’t made a self-center...
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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. Auto plants in Detroit closed on March 18. 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.
“We can’t lose Boeing,” President Trump said.
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.
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.”
The Boeing leaders he inspired went on to create great wealth—for their own families, if not their company. Jim McNerney, born to command, became chief executive of the U.S. Equestrian Team Foundation and retired to two adjoining multimillion-dollar homes in Wellington, Florida.
Phil Condit, who launched the merger with McDonnell Douglas and hosted sessions about the corporate soul at a forested mansion, built a second mansion with his fourth wife.
The former McDonnell Douglas chief Harry Stonecipher is still raising hackles—most recently in a suburb of Asheville, North Carolina, where he and his second wife sued the town over an ordinance preventing them from keeping twelve cats in their sixty-seven-hundred-square-foot ...
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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.
After seeing the Justice Department’s settlement of “the 737 Max Fraud Conspiracy,” as the press release put it, a pilot who worked with Forkner and Gustavsson suggested a different headline. It would say that Boeing got away with murder.
