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

by Peter Robison

At one point, Nadia asked Michael O’Donnell, the FAA’s family liaison, for a technical briefing about the plane. She asked if they could bring an aeronautical engineer to the meeting and he said no, families only. Nadia asked around to see who else among the grieving relatives had aerospace expertise. She connected with Javier de Luis, the MIT lecturer whose sister, UN translator Graziella de Luis y Ponce, had died in the Ethiopia crash. At the meeting, FAA officials explained how in the forthcoming, revised MCAS, the software would rely on two AoA sensors instead of one. In any cases of disagreement, it would shut down. De Luis listened in disbelief. Even the space shuttle, developed in the 1970s, had five redundant computers. Airbus planes typically used three sensors. The solution also seemed shockingly clunky: If the software was necessary to keep the plane’s nose from pitching up in certain situations, what would happen in a flight that encountered one of those rare situations and didn’t have MCAS available? “If a student came in with this design, I wouldn’t pass him,” de Luis told them.

Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois brought the authority of a trained pilot—and, implicitly, her own sacrifice—to her own round of questioning. Duckworth lost her legs in combat in Iraq as a U.S. Army helicopter pilot. “Time and again Boeing has not told the whole truth to this committee and to the families,” she said, her voice rising to a near shout. “A pilot’s best friend is time and altitude. And on takeoff he’s got no altitude, and he’s got no time. You set those pilots up for failure.”

The MAX scandal was swept from the front pages. In the dark calculus of twenty-first-century corporate management, a global tragedy was also an opportunity, a chance to reset expectations for Boeing on Calhoun’s own terms. Boeing was no longer a corporate pariah whose mismanagement had contributed to a catastrophic loss of life; it was an endangered American manufacturer working to secure the livelihoods of tens of thousands of employees in the midst of a national emergency. “We can’t lose Boeing,” President Trump said.

A third crash of the MAX (even if not Boeing’s fault) would have the potential to be devastating for the plane’s reputation—similar to the McDonnell Douglas DC-10, whose crash in Paris, in an eerie coincidence, had cost exactly the same number of lives, 346, and whose commercial prospects were finished by a later accident.

Many people in the industry—and especially at Boeing—still believe the twenty-month grounding was an overreaction, Boeing the fall guy for lousy overseas pilots and sanctimonious whistleblowers. One of the most pointed comments to the final Airworthiness Directive published by the FAA came from an American Airlines pilot: “Interesting that none of the three major airlines had any problems with MCAS. Let’s get her back in the AIR!” For airlines confronting their own existential crisis after the pandemic, the MAX, for all its infamy, is a moneymaker. Those giant engines—no longer soda cans, now more resembling Big Gulps—save 15 percent on fuel costs for every flight. And instead of tiny winglets raked at the tips of the wings, as on the earlier 737 Next Generation, there were “split scimitars” in each direction, sluicing every last percentage point of efficiency from the airflow. American had another reason to be the first in the United States to fly the MAX in the last days of 2020, one that it hadn’t stated publicly: the terms of its bank financing were tied to the plane’s use on paid routes that year. Renegotiating them would have been more costly than being first to put the MAX back in the skies and taking whatever public-relations flak came with it. In the end there was little of that, with cost-sensitive fliers seeing few hassle-free ways to avoid the MAX. That first week, even during the pandemic, the flights were more than 90 percent full. People reflexively trusted ...

There’s also the matter of the redheaded stepchild that already went out the door. Even after all the cancellations, MAX orders number more than three thousand, and the plane will likely become common in airline fleets over the next several years. Ryanair and Alaska Airlines lent their support with additional orders, undoubtedly at deep discounts.

“With its unique systems design, the 737 operates in some scenarios at reduced safety margins compared to modern aircraft,” as one Boeing employee, less eager to get the plane back up in the air, wrote in his own comments to the FAA. That person was Curtis Ewbank, the young engineer who had tried to get his bosses to listen to his concerns about the MAX’s design, quit in frustration, and eventually rejoined Boeing. His comments painstakingly laid out the scenarios where the plane is lacking. The rudder cables remain vulnerable to engine shrapnel, the issue that thirteen FAA specialists wanted fixed before they were overridden by managers. In a jam of the elevator system, the crew is expected to “literally learn on the fly,” while reading notes from the checklist—something pilots don’t train for in a simulator, he said. Some of the cockpit alerts, he added, leave the crew to interpret and deal with erroneous information instead of removing it automatically as in a more modern design; the MAX remains the only large commercial airliner without an electronic checklist to guide pilots.

Conceived in haste to avoid losing market share, the MAX ended up putting Boeing into the deepest hole in its history. The American export champion delivered 157 planes in 2020 compared to 566 for Airbus. Even by one of its own design ambitions—avoiding simulator training—the MAX was a failure. Pilots transitioning from the previous 737 will now need to train in a simulator, a welcome requirement for safety but one that will hamper its commercial prospects. Boeing faces competition from not just Airbus but also an emboldened aircraft maker from China, Comac, whose government by midyear had yet to unground the MAX. Meant to cost $2.5 billion—a simple derivative of a model updated a dozen times since the 1960s—the MAX easily exceeded the $20 billion Boeing might have spent on an all-new program. The direct cost was $21 billion, including compensation to customers, aircraft storage, pilot training, and settlements to the families.

After an investigation lasting almost two years, the Justice Department levied what it called a $2.5 billion fine on Boeing and agreed to a deferred prosecution of one count of criminal fraud conspiracy, stemming from its two pilots’ inaccurate representations to the FAA about how the MCAS software worked. The bulk of the fine, though, came from compensation payments of $1.77 billion to customers and $500 million in settlements to victims’ families—most of which it was likely to pay anyway. The amount of the criminal penalty was only $243.6 million, which, as the complaint noted, was about what it would have cost Boeing to let MAX pilots train in a simulator in the first place.