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

by Peter Robison

The latter project, called Cinema Connexion by Boeing, signed AMC Entertainment as an early customer. AMC hoped to replace the film canisters and projection reels then still in use in its theaters with 50-gigabyte digital files transmitted via a secure network of satellites and ground stations. Stonecipher hosted a weird press conference at Boeing’s headquarters in November 2000 featuring a video linkup with Ben Affleck, star of Bounce, the first Hollywood movie delivered via satellite to a theater through the new Boeing system. The movie was about an advertising executive (Affleck) who gives his airline ticket to a stranger—who is then killed when the flight crashes. Affleck, awash in guilt, manages the ad campaign to help the airline recover, while trying to summon the courage to confess his own role to the man’s grieving wife (Gwyneth Paltrow). It was a mark of the plane maker’s reputation at the time that news stories about the venture, and Boeing itself, breezed past the unlikely choice of subject matter. “It’s more of a love story,” a spokesperson said.