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

by Peter Robison

The 737 by then accounted for about a third of the entire company’s profit, but it was still the redheaded stepchild, not something you spent money on. “It’s a pig with lipstick, just a simple old airplane,” said one former Boeing pilot. The resources and people devoted to the program reflected that; it got the “B” team. Many of the others working on it, like Ludtke, squeezed in their work on the MAX alongside other more pressing projects. “The 737 was something of a backwater,” said Peter Lemme, a former flight controls engineer. What’s more, low-cost Southwest Airlines, the biggest customer, had no desire to push the envelope. It wanted its ten thousand pilots to be able to step into the new plane without any additional training, which would save it huge costs as well as logistical headaches. Early in the program, Boeing managers told the flight controls team that under no circumstances were they to make any changes that would require pilots switching from the previous 737 to the MAX to step into a simulator. The reason: Boeing had promised Southwest $1 million per airplane if simulator training was required—and the carrier by 2019 had ordered 246. That was all the incentive Boeing needed.

Simulator vs. incentive