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

by Peter Robison

Some pilots weren’t so willing to let the matter drop. In Shanghai that fall, a couple of Boeing trainers ran into a pilot from American Airlines, who laid into them for “the lives that we cost” in Indonesia, as one of the pilots later described the uncomfortable encounter. “Hey, hold on,” the Boeing pilot responded, cautioning him to wait for more evidence. Back in Seattle, he joined a half dozen fellow Boeing trainers for a briefing about how the MCAS software worked from Patrik Gustavsson, the former Ryanair pilot who had traded frustrated messages with Forkner two years earlier. Gustavsson was now the chief 737 technical pilot. When Gustavsson told them the software fired based on a single angle-of-attack vane and that it would continue firing even after a bad reading, “we were universally shocked,” this person said. The group consisted of trainers who’d been left “out of the loop,” as Gustavsson himself had put it. They instantly recognized the flaw in its design. “The pilot’s fighting the jet the entire time,” as one person there put it. One of Boeing’s engineers had said virtually the same thing during the testing of MCAS, but his email had an unhurried, innocuous tone—you could sense the coffee and air-conditioning. To these pilots, the stakes were immediately clear. The situation was life-threatening.