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

by Peter Robison

The plane was a DC-10, a slightly smaller wide-body McDonnell Douglas had developed to keep up with Boeing’s 747. The engineers on the Douglas side in Southern California had struggled mightily for the needed investments, Mr. Mac holding the purse strings as tightly as ever. To save valuable interior cargo space, they broke with industry convention by designing a door that opened outward. At a stockholders’ meeting a month after the crash, a McDonnell Douglas executive blamed an “illiterate” baggage handler at Turkish Airlines (who spoke three languages) for failing to latch the cargo door properly.2 It emerged that Douglas engineers had known the design was vulnerable to a catastrophic failure, and indeed, two years earlier, a near disaster had ensued on a flight over Windsor, Ontario, which also lost a cargo door. The pilot had been able to land the plane in that case. Instead of fixing the issue immediately, McDonnell Douglas had convinced the FAA to let it add a support plate over

What happens when an airliner gets developped in a rush to compete.