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

by Peter Robison

The Airbus team courted American’s CEO, Gerard Arpey, and its president, Tom Horton, over frequent lunches at the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, a boutique hotel where they didn’t think they’d be spotted. Moving to the Ritz-Carlton during a stretch of hundred-degree days lasting nearly two weeks that July, they reached agreement on an order for hundreds of planes. Arpey called Albaugh to let him know the carrier was ready to buy Airbus aircraft; what could Boeing do for them? Albaugh kept his cool and said he’d get back to American with an offer of his own. Privately, though, he was furious that his Dallas residents hadn’t picked up any intelligence about the talks and unenthusiastic about making a public U-turn in strategy. Within a week, Boeing made a counterproposal for a hypothetical 737 outfitted with more powerful engines, a model so new it didn’t yet have a name. The world would come to know it as the 737 MAX 8. — Just like the original 737, the design was quick and dirty. Over the decades, the 737’s engines had gone from cigar-shaped, to ovoids squished on the bottom, to soda cans clipped in front of the wings. Now, to fit even bigger turbofans onto the same basic low-slung fuselage, Boeing would mount them still farther forward of the wings, and raise the nose gear about eight inches. This would change the plane’s center of gravity, not to mention the view from the cockpit for pilots, potentially forcing them to undertake additional training, always costly for...