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

by Peter Robison

A week later, on the evening of January 15, Boeing CEO Jim McNerney was just setting out some fish to bake at his house, a many-gabled French country-style château in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, when his phone started vibrating with messages about another battery fire. Passengers had to descend on the emergency slides of an All Nippon Airways Dreamliner after the captain smelled smoke in the cockpit and diverted midflight to the nearest runway in Japan. A flurry of phone calls followed, but to little effect. The next morning, despite the dramatic events, both Boeing and the FAA agreed the plane should keep flying. The agency’s administrator, Michael Huerta, spoke to LaHood and told him the staff was reluctant to ground the plane. Data still suggested battery fires were a rare event; it was possibly just a fluke that two happened in such close proximity. LaHood decided to trust his gut instead. “Michael, it’s my call, I’m doing it,” he told him. He ordered the FAA to ground the Dreamliner, the first time the agency had done so for a Boeing jetliner and its only grounding of any model since the McDonnell Douglas DC-10, when a federal judge ordered it after the Chicago crash in 1979. LaHood called McNerney, and the CEO started raising objections. “I know you’re not happy,” LaHood replied in his prairie-flat midwestern accent. “And you know what, I’m not happy about the fact that there’s smoke and fire in these planes!” He said the Dreamliners could fly again when he go...