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

by Peter Robison

Forkner, chief of the MAX manual writers, felt relaxed enough to send a note to an old friend he’d worked with at the FAA. “Things are calming down a bit for my airplane cert, at least for now,” he wrote. The only things left were validating the simulator for the MAX and a bit of traveling, or, as he put it: “Jedi-mind tricking regulators into accepting the training that I got accepted by FAA etc.” By November, though, he was seeing the plane in a different light. Sitting in a hotel room in Miami with a Grey Goose, he vented to his deputy, a former Ryanair pilot named Patrik Gustavsson, about the plane’s “egregious” performance in the simulator. No one had told him that MCAS, originally intended to prevent stalls at high speed, could now possibly fire at speeds as low as 150 miles per hour. “I’m levelling off at like 4000 ft, 230 knots and the plane is trimming itself like craxy [sic],” he wrote. “I’m like, WHAT?” Gustavsson’s first reaction was the sheer frustration of the fed-up office worker. “Oh great,” he replied—now they had to update the description in the manual. But Forkner appeared to have deeper concerns. He wrote that it meant he had “lied (unknowingly) to the regulator” about the system’s authority over the stabilizer, its ability to flummox a pilot. “Why are we just now hearing about this?” Forkner asked. “I don’t know, the test pilots have kept us out of the loop,” Gustavsson replied. “They’re all so damn busy, and getting pressure from the program,” Forkner...