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

by Peter Robison

Ali Bahrami, the FAA’s safety chief, kept taking calls from his foreign counterparts. They’d say, “ ‘Ali, ‘I’m really sorry, minister asked us to ground the fleet,’ ” as he described it later. He insisted there was still no data. That Monday, the FAA had gotten the readout from the plane’s satellite transponder, but the agency didn’t have the expertise to analyze it. (“Other authorities may have,” Bahrami later said. “We don’t have any of that.”) The FAA handed the readout to the NTSB, which delivered it to Boeing, whose engineers then examined it. They asked Bahrami for an urgent conference call on Wednesday morning. Satellite transponders on aircraft record the position, altitude, direction, and speed every eight seconds. The Boeing officials showed Bahrami and his team a graphic that superimposed these traces from the flight in Ethiopia over the Lion Air plane’s last moments. It was a match. In addition, a piece of the plane had been recovered that showed the flaps were in an “up” position—a precondition for MCAS to fire. There was nothing more to say; Bahrami walked out of his office and told his boss they needed to ground the fleet. The FAA issued the order that Wednesday, three days after the crash. It was the second such admission of failure in just six years for a new Boeing model, following the Dreamliner—a grim milestone that even much-maligned McDonnell Douglas never reached. Its only grounding was the DC-10.