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

by Peter Robison

Boeing—the epitome of American engineering excellence—was going downmarket. It even started selling bare-bones versions, offering as options equipment that Airbus sold as standard. A backup fire extinguisher in the cargo hold, for instance, cost extra. This was permissible because a backup wasn’t mandated by the FAA. (In places including Japan, however, regulators did require it, mindful of incidents in which the primary system had failed.) In another fateful example, Boeing charged $80,000 for an angle-of-attack indicator—the seemingly peripheral cockpit gauge whose absence would figure in the doomed Lion Air and Ethiopian flights, neither of which was equipped with the optional equipment. Customers often came back to Airbus and told them Boeing’s offer was lower priced, and its salespeople would have to pore through the details to see what was missing, said John Leahy, the New York native who ran sales at Airbus for thirty years. It reached the point that Airbus estimated a bare-bones A320 had $2.5 million to $3 million more in standard equipment than a 737. That logic was one of the things that caused trouble for Boeing, Leahy said: “ ‘Let’s make everything an optional extra, let’s strip the airplane down; we can’t do extra training, we don’t want to make the airplane too expensive, we’re in a price war.’ ”