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

by Peter Robison

At a meeting in 2012, Reed, the FAA engineer who had so reluctantly joined the Boeing Aviation Safety Oversight Office, questioned Boeing managers about the plan to leave the cockpit of the new MAX largely unchanged. It would make the 737 the last big commercial jet flying without an electronic crew alerting system—like the one Boeing had pioneered on the 757 and 767 fully thirty years earlier. “I was saying, ‘Guys, make the break, put a modern flight deck in this airplane,’ ” Reed recalls. He pointed out that many of the older pilots who grew up with 737s were retiring. Younger pilots had often started in commuter planes made by Embraer in Brazil or Bombardier in Canada, with far more advanced cockpits. Even the newest military planes had checklists that appeared on touch screens. If a hydraulic pump failed, a message would pop up showing specific actions the pilot should take. On the 737, a light showing “low hydraulic pressure” might illuminate with no further explanation. Pilots would have to rely on memory or turn to their paper handbook. “Training issue,” the Boeing executive responded to Reed, in rejecting such changes. If Boeing had been building a brand-new plane, it would have been required to have the electronic checklist. But because the MAX was being examined as an amendment to the original type certificate awarded in 1967, managers could pursue an exception. The MAX was actually the thirteenth version of the plane, counting all the variants along the way—the ...

Why no electronic checklist