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

by Peter Robison

At one point, Nadia asked Michael O’Donnell, the FAA’s family liaison, for a technical briefing about the plane. She asked if they could bring an aeronautical engineer to the meeting and he said no, families only. Nadia asked around to see who else among the grieving relatives had aerospace expertise. She connected with Javier de Luis, the MIT lecturer whose sister, UN translator Graziella de Luis y Ponce, had died in the Ethiopia crash. At the meeting, FAA officials explained how in the forthcoming, revised MCAS, the software would rely on two AoA sensors instead of one. In any cases of disagreement, it would shut down. De Luis listened in disbelief. Even the space shuttle, developed in the 1970s, had five redundant computers. Airbus planes typically used three sensors. The solution also seemed shockingly clunky: If the software was necessary to keep the plane’s nose from pitching up in certain situations, what would happen in a flight that encountered one of those rare situations and didn’t have MCAS available? “If a student came in with this design, I wouldn’t pass him,” de Luis told them.