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

by Peter Robison

The same propensity to pitch up at high speeds, the quirk of design that had led to the adoption of MCAS, was also present during some tests of low-speed stalls. Regulation required the control stick to give steadily increasing forces in such an event, signaling to pilots the onset of a stall; instead it got mushy, less reactive. The pilots told Teal the plane wasn’t “certifiable” in that condition, meaning it wouldn’t pass muster with the FAA. By the end of that March, the engineers and test pilots had arrived at a solution. Again—all but unavoidably at this late stage—the answer would be the software. They would expand MCAS to cover low speeds as well as high. It had the benefit, once more, of being cheap. “All changes are minimal / low collateral damage, therefore no additional flight testing,” one memo said. The same day Leverkuhn and Teal approved the plan, Forkner emailed the FAA’s Klein for permission to delete MCAS from the flight manual because it “only operates WAY outside of the normal operating envelope.” Still focused on his mission of minimizing training, he possibly didn’t even know about the software changes. Klein certainly didn’t; she agreed. By this time, many of the engineers who had worked on the MAX early in its design had moved on to other projects. Ewbank and others with expertise in human factors were gone. Many of those who remained (the pilots thought of them as interchangeable units from the University of Washington, making $90,000 a year) lacke...