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

by Peter Robison

The task of testing the new Dash 80 went to a onetime barnstormer from Kansas named Alvin “Tex” Johnston. He got his nickname in the 1940s when he showed up in cowboy boots for a job with Bell Aircraft in Niagara Falls, New York. It soon took him to the famous Muroc Army Air Base in California (now Edwards Air Force Base), where another pilot, Chuck Yeager, would fly the Bell X-1 past the sound barrier. In the fraternity of pilots, there is no shortage of ego. Tex wrote in his autobiography that he had a one-word answer when an attractive young female psychologist evaluating him for a job at Boeing asked what he liked better than anything in the world: “Copulation.” Johnston earned a place in company lore when, in 1955, at a time when skepticism of jets was still high, he executed a barrel roll of the Dash 80 over a crowd of three hundred thousand spectators—and a second one so that people who had missed the first one could see it. He hadn’t told anyone of his plans before flying over the Gold Cup, a hydroplane race on Lake Washington that happened to coincide with a pair of industry conventions. Afterward, Allen asked what he thought he was doing. “Selling airplanes,” Johnston replied. (As the pilot describes it in his autobiography, Allen gave him a mild dressing-down, then invited him for dinner with Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I fighter ace who then ran Eastern Air Lines. Rickenbacker pulled Tex’s Stetson over his ears and exclaimed, “You slow rollin’ S.O.B.!”)