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

by Peter Robison

The MAX had a single cutout switch. If pilots flipped it, as directed in an emergency, they’d no longer be able to adjust the electric trim with the button under their thumbs. They’d have no choice but to use the manual trim wheel, the one that the deadheading third pilot had noticed was moving on its own the night before the Lion Air crash. That wasn’t easy. Pilots trained on moving the wheel in refresher courses once a year, but some went their whole careers without ever using it in flight. It was especially rare to have to deal with conditions so jarring in the midst of a takeoff or a landing, the most critical moments of any flight. Boeing had reports of the stick shaker activating at or shortly after takeoff only thirty times between 2001 and 2018, during which hundreds of millions of flights had taken place. Of those instances, twenty-seven were on 737s.