Until the Max all Boeing planes allowed the pilot to make all the choices involved in flying their plane. Even if it meant that the pilot might exceed a particular parameter if the pilot believed it was necessary to save the plane. Airbus has gone the path of letting the software decide. The 'miracle on the Hudson' was caused by Airbus' engine software automatically shutting the engines after each was damaged by bird ingestion. If it had been a Boeing plane the pilot could have used the engines to either turn around back to LaGuardia or go on to Teterboro. Instead, with no engines, he had to come down on the Hudson.
For Boeing to say that the software control did not need to be in the manuals is troublesome to say the least.
10
Boeing dragged it's feet on developing a 737 replacement, just rolling 737s out of Renton was so profitable. When the CS300 and A320NEO came out, Boeing continued on the cheapskate path. Airlines would have been willing to wait 2 or 3 years for an all new 737 replacement, Boeing didn't want to spend $20 billion for a plane that would have been less profitable. Now Boeing is 10 years behind Airbus, who will deliver over 5,000 A220s and A320NEOs, including possibly A220-500s and A320XLRs before Boeing can start delivering a 797. Boeing's greedy 300% tariff on Deltas Cseries order handed Airbus a gift. Airlines around the world will abandon the 737MAX, even Southwest may have to face customer and employee backlash and move to a new model, and Airbus will be the only option for 6 to 8 years.
15
If Boeing were a military entity those at the top including Mr. Sinnett would be relieved of their duties for a lack of confidence in their leadership. It's a harsh standard that demands attention to detail but punishes those who fail in that responsibility. The captain of a ship is ultimately responsible for all that happens, good or bad. A number of Boeing "captains" failed that standard.
12
“For flight-critical software, I don’t think you want us to rush, rush it faster.”
So rather than rushing, we waited 'til another aircraft went down with all hands, which was apparently a better strategy than 'rushing?'
12
Boeing continues its meretricious and cowardly policy of blaming the pilots for two deadly accidents caused by defects which Boeing knew about and concealed from its customers. Unless there is both individual and corporate accountability (read, prison sentences and huge fines combined with special ongoing oversight), they will keep cutting corners and killing passengers.
15
Boeing was once a beautiful company but now it is just part of the degrading attitude of money first, morals last.
12
According to the Times, after every other country had grounded the Max:
"Dennis A. Muilenburg, the chief executive of Boeing, spoke to President Trump on the phone and made the case that the 737 Max planes should not be grounded in the United States."
Just appalling.
24
Is it lost on anyone that Boeing 'hiding' the changes to the 737 Max series, and lack of transparency about the MCAS system parallels actions and intent of the Trump adminstration in their hiding the unredacted Mueller report from Congress and the public, denying Congress access to people and information for their oversight function of the executive, and the Attorney General and Assistant Attorney General misleading the public as to the contents and conclusions of that report?
It is all part of the same playbook, and has some of the same genesis, in terms of the type of people who perpetrate such activities, and the ethical and moral bankruptcy of said perpetrators.
15
“I would think that there would be a priority of putting explanations of things that could kill you,” Mr. Wissing said.
The reason they did not tell the pilots and be more transparent with this system, is that they wanted the plane to appear it has less changes to the prior 737's than it actually did. They did not want the scrutiny by the FAA for certification, and they did not want to trigger simulation training by pilots, that would cost the airlines.
Period.
15
The problem is the corporate culture at Boeing and its leadership, more than any other factor, and the influences that established that culture.
14
@Steve K. And the influence that established that culture was the 1997 “merger” of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. The joke being that McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money - and brought their greedy, money first, safety last culture with them.
10
This story is an incredible indictment of Boeing. I would not want to be Mike Sinnett today. He's the public face of Boeing's priority to boost corporate profits at the expense of passenger safety. And still Boeing refuses to take responsibility for these airline disasters that resulted in over 300 dead passengers and crew.
Seems to me that Boeing was striving to be the corporate equivalent of Murder, Inc.
16
I must confess that after reading this article on the manner in which Boeing executives dealt with the demands of the American Airlines pilots, my confidence in ex-Boeing executive Patrick Michael Shanahan, presently acting US Secretary of Defence and nominated by Mr Trump to be the next Secretary, has been further enhanced....
Henri
6
“The worst thing that can ever happen is a tragedy like this, and the even worse thing would be another one.”
This can only be described as hauntingly prescient. Because the even worse thing did happen. It's as if the Boeing executives actually foresaw the second crash.
8
This is the best evidence that the "limited liability" protection enjoyed by corporation needs serious revision. Indeed, the entire world of corporate law needs revision to bring back the fundamental idea that, since society enables corporations, they must be regulated, not to the benefit only of share holders but of the general public. Of course it will take the complete elimination of the current Republican Party before anything half decent like this can happen.
17
Killing people is just acceptable collateral damage in business.
17
The "crappy job of fixing" that Boeing was so worried about is their profits impact. No one does not "fix" something (proven to be fatal) worrying about doing a crappy job. It's not "use until fixed right". It's "don't use until fixed right."
Where's Feynman and his glass of ice water? NASA and Morton-Thiokol: FAA and Boeing.
Boeing: the new tobacco industry. Keep pushing murderous planes, keep killing passengers until causation is "proven beyond a shadow of a doubt". Trump has the lawyers for you!
13
Does (did) Mr. Sinnett fly on these planes? When they are back in the air, will he let his family fly on these planes? What about the other Boeing execs? I'm not flying on one until I know they all do.
15
Obviously, the leadership of Boeing needs to be removed.
It will be very hard to sell jets when the company is not transparent nor supportive of urgent solutions to defects.
13
Who will be held responsible? How?
It always appears when I view the excesses of the venal and self serving, these same question goes unanswered.
The wealthy and connected always skate. At least in the US a great leak forward has been accomplished. Exposure!
We often find out who they are. Now if we can distance ourselves further from the totalitarians and really implement the true meaning of "We are better than that."
Humanity will benefit.
9
“No one has yet to conclude that the sole cause of this was this function on the airplane,” Mr. Sinnett said.
And on that level of certainty he gambled countless human lives, finally killing nearly 200 more, because profits.
Remember, corporations are people but they do not go to jail!
18
We have to infer from the l'affaire Boeing Max 8 that the Capitalism, as it is practiced in America, has taken two brilliant ideas too far.
The first is return on equity (ROE), one way of measuring value creation that has managed to eclipse many other, and broader, ones.
The second is competition, which has come to be seen as an end in itself rather than as a tool for promoting growth and innovation.
“Churchill observed that “First we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” and the same is even more true of our performance metrics. Enormous political weight is given to GDP, and GDP per capita, but very little to the many other indicators of value creation. In indices that track the performance of world economies, the U.S. routinely fails to make the top 10 on non financial dimensions but continues to make choices on the basis of GDP impact.
Since the 1980s—the decade of deregulation and economic value analysis—business leaders in the U.S. have focused ever more narrowly on return on equity as the gospel of success.
Time to recall the Thomas Piketty message that “unless we act, inequality will grow much worse, eventually making a mockery of our democratic institutions. With wealth more and more concentrated, countries racing to cut taxes on capital, and inheritance coming to rival entrepreneurship as a source of riches, new patrimonial elite may prove as inevitable as Tocqueville once believed democratic equality was”.
17
No doubt Boeing should have done more, and been more proactive after the first incident. However, the real failure in both cases is with the pilots and their apparently poor training. The failure was one which caused a runaway trim condition, a condition which all pilots should be able to easily deal with. Unfortunately, in both these cases, they were not.
5
A previous NYT article indicated pilots, knowing what to expect in a simulator, only had 40 seconds to prevent an irretrievable situation. I think the most important thing is for Boeing not to design a system that can crash the plane in 40 seconds, not for pilots to train to rescue Boeing from their calamitous errors.
72
@Dubliner 40 seconds is more than enough time to correct a runaway trim. You should recognize in 5 seconds the plane is pitching down uncontrollably, and flipping the two switches takes another 5 seconds.
3
>>> "The failure was one which caused a runaway trim condition, a condition which all pilots should be able to easily deal with."
Not true. MCAS operation, because of its intermittent nature, does NOT present in the same way as ordinary runaway trim.
There is, now an enormous amount of information, both in the mainstream media and in the aviation world, that makes it clear that the situations faced by the Lion and Ethiopian crews were not ones that an average crew would have been able to "easily deal with." Take a look at this, from Aviation Week, for example:
"Ethiopian MAX Crash Simulator Scenario Stuns Pilots"
https://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/ethiopian-max-crash-simulator-scenario-stuns-pilots
The lead sentence: "A simulator session flown by a U.S.-based Boeing 737 MAX crew that mimicked a key portion of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 (ET302) accident sequence suggests that the Ethiopian crew faced a near-impossible task of getting their 737 MAX 8 back under control, and underscores the importance of pilots understanding severe runaway trim recovery procedures."
44
Boeing seems to have forgotten that flying an airplane is a wondrous experience that allows man to feel like a bird, closer to the heavens.
A corporation that loses its sense of wonder is doomed.
12
Just a couple points that the media does not seem to be covering:
1) In the first crash, the previous flight segment flown by a different crew had a similar experience with the anti-stall system with a bad sensor. They were lucky and skilled enough to land the plane safely. But no follow-up occurred concerning the air-worthiness of the aircraft. This appears to be a MAJOR oversight by Lion Air. I suspect the protocol of most carriers would be to ground the plane until it was repaired.
2) In the second crash, the co-pilot with a grand total of 200 hours (total, not just in that aircraft) had control of the aircraft as the captain was sorting through check-lists. This novice co-pilot had the throttle at full take-off power while trying to recover from a dive, a very foolish move.
I am not saying that Boeing is not without fault. Its just that a broader perspective might be in order.
6
@What Crisis. I am no pilot but I assume the throttle was at max because the computer (reading the faulty sensor) was reporting the plane was in danger of stalling. A faulty pitot tube sensor also played a role in the Air France crash over the Atlantic Ocean a few years ago. It’s a bit worriesome that this technology that is supposed to make us safer can lead to the opposite.
12
@What Crisis
Well, nearly all aircraft "hull losses" (as the euphemism goes) arise from a compounding of problems. The DC-10 cargo door problem, eg, was 1 part design, 4 parts maintenance.
Here the problem is a failure of a critical component right on takeoff. That the component was poorly documented, trivialized, and arose from a single point of failure is not tolerable, no matter what other issues may have compounded the problem. That this was not a design oversight or something unforeseen despite best known practices (such as the wing failures on the Electra) but a cost-cutting priority for management is unforgivable.
19
@What Crisis
what is being reported is that MCAS comes alive from data from a single sensor: the system switches after each flight.
So if sensor A is damaged on take-off; and yet the plane can land; when the mechanics switch on; to test for the reported fault: sensor B is now the live one: and it shows no fault; so the plane is cleared. It is understood that is what happened with the first crash.
So mechanics turn system off; cleared; new crew turn system on: sensor A (faulty) comes alive to run the show.
That is what is reported to have happened. I hope this helps.
It is clear no-one had been told of all this, least of the all the mechanics, who normally are very well versed.
10
A conventional stab trim runaway is a pretty rare event on the 737s, one most pilots never have to deal with. Whatever arguments are being made for the soundness of the Max design and the thoroughness of the MCAS fault hazard analysis and review and certification process, two incidents of the same failure occurred within a short space of time resulting in total losses of the aircraft and everyone on board. There was a breakdown somewhere and a rake was left hidden in the tall grass of the software for unsuspecting pilots to step on.
10
Where is the reporting on the company that made the faulty part, the angle of attack indicator? What about their culpability in letting failure prone parts out into the world? How did TWO faulty angle of attack sensors escape their quality system? What about the airlines? We know that pilots for Lion AIr had reported problems the day before the crash, why don't we hear about the airline's sloppy maintenance in not finding the defect? What is the record on these AoA sensors? How many have failed in the field? How many squawks have been made against them? I'm not saying that Boeing doesn't hold some of the responsibility but the AoA sensor was flight qualified and failed twice. Where is the reporting on that?
7
@Rick Girard The AoA vane replacement that EAL completed the night before the accident requires a huge protractor like apparatus be bolted to the side of the airplane. Want to take any bets that manufacturer guidance wasn't followed? I'm not defending Boeing. Equipment malfunction notwithstanding, Boeing designed and certified an airplane that appears to be uncontrollable in certain flight regimes. It also appears that after they became aware of the problem, they chose what they thought would be the lower cost option of taking incremental action with the software instead of a more conservative approach. And even now, they're beating the pilot blame drum pretty loudly, when in fact what we're seeing is criminal negligence.
15
@Rick Girard There has been some reporting on it and the company that makes that specific AoA sensor has a bad track record.
Also, the MAX only takes data from one of these sensors on the plane. This is one of the fundamental design flaws of the system.
9
These are all excellent questions that I trust an investigation will address.
3
Boeing is a great American company that gave aviation to the masses. The two planes that crashed were from low quality airlines based in developing countries with pilot training that is far below the level found in white countries. To blame Boeing is the height of absurdity.
3
@JJ
Boeing must engineer for real conditions and pilots, not for ideal conditions or ideal pilots.
Boeing should bring management back to the plants where engineers work. They should get SC workers organized and trained. Empower people to make good decisions. Boeing can be a great company like it was but they need to suck it up and stop blaming the customer.
This is Boeing's fault. User error, psh!
20
@JJ
The Ethiopian pilots were well trained and experienced, as is the country's ground crew. Your racism is inappropriate.
40
Really? That is the best you can come up with? Did you even read the article? Yes, let’s wait until another 737 Max piloted by Americans and full of American passengers crash. Then the flaws in the plane’s design would be worth worrying Boeing about.
17
Apparently Boeing has a bigger problem than their planes: its management is deaf and blind.
15
American Airlines said in a statement...
Mr. Sinnott replied...
The real voices need to be the pilots.
I won’t fly this plane for a long time even if it means short hops or no travel.
I just don’t trust Boeing.
8
Just don’t buy anything Boeing.
6
Administration Incompetence, private and public, remains a big problem for this country. 55 years since the 737 hit the market is enough time for 2 generations of executives to make it to retirement. Did they think the design would be good for another 55 years?
9
How about a fix for Boeing that includes criminal charges/negligence for the executives that approved this and significant jail time. My guess is that plane safety would improve.
13
Pilots and doctors should not be able to perform having taken opioids.
1
@AC Grindl
No one should. What are you insinuating?
4
Obviously mistakes resulting in big tragedies. Plane nose forced down, plane crashes, pilots “should have known” but didn’t. That was a tough one. On the one hand mistakes happen, yes, but hauteur and arrogance along with a drastic fear of not meeting “target” goals for profit were seemingly in play here. Boeing has indeed been a fantastic success story and has contributed mightily to our country’s and world’s well-being with its grand projects and airplanes, but this is a case of a company that flew too high (pun not intended) for too long and lacked the humility or internal controls (again pun not intended) at a critical time. And so the world turns.
5
I've always been afraid of flying, but due to living in Europe for several years and visiting home in California annually, plus taking advantage of the opportunity to see most of Europe on weekend trips eventually allowed me to board a plane without shaky knees.
That was years ago. Today, I fear for my air traveling son every time he boards a plane.
2
All this makes me glad that, for both environmental and safety reasons, I've decided I will never fly anywhere again.
If I can't get there by car or rail, I'm not going.
Air travel has turned into a nightmarish cattle drive scene. I absolutely hate it. No more. Not worth it.
7
@Ambient Kestrel
Great analogy, “cattle drive”.
3
@Pat Yesterday I flew out of Grand Rapids via Chicago Midway. The heifers in the Midwest just keep getting larger and larger every year.
3
The consolidation of aircraft manufacturing has taken from the equation competition for customers. The end result is lesser urgency for ensuring passenger safety.
5
And a former Boeing executive has been nominated to become Secretary of Defense.
20
@Frank Schubert
What could possibly go wrong then?
7
Were the main departments of Boeing so out of touch with each other, so compartmentalized that earning/saving money in a shortsighted way came to compete with building a workable plane? Were the engineers pressured to become increasingly invested in an intrinsically flawed design that with each step created new problems? Did the data and their knowledge and experience require them to re-evaluate their plan or did they instead place patches, inadequate fixes that necessitated further patching as they went along? We would call the product of such work, here in Spain, a chapuza. Scary that engineering with its precision, coupled with corporate interests, has given the flying public and let’s also include the rest of us on the ground, a chapuza. And somehow, they were satisfied with that.
14
Self regulation and safety are anathem. Strict regulations that are enforced protect the public and the environment. The laxity that Trump (and greed) promotes puts profits over all else. The FCC is complicit in this corruption. As is the EPA, the Dept of Educ, HUD, and the Republicans in Congress
16
Every time the Lion Air or Ethiopian air flight went up (about 8 times each before they crashed) All the pilots had to do was turn the auto stab system off and keep flying. But as we heard from Ethiopian Air, When the plane went up they turned the system on again. Then when it went down they turned it off then up=on etc. They did exactly what the AD said not to do and they crashed. The old 737 flight system had the same recovery procedure for stab run away. Turn it off, leave it off. It is in the original 737 manual and every 737 pilot no matter what version is schooled on the procedure. I am long retired but recognized the uncommanded nose down symptom immediately because it is essentially the same as the old 737's I am very familiar with. The Max is no different. Turn it off, leave it off. Adjust stab trim manually. It is pretty easy really. The Pilot continues to fly the co pilot nulls the plane forces with the wheel. If there isn't more to this, the pilots must be blamed. It is a total cop out to blame the book or training.
All pilots trained on any 737 before the Max are seriously trained in stab run away. Don't even try and plea confusion. These are real pilots not video game "flyers." Why the times is not telling the whole story is beyond me. They are better than that.
4
>>> "Adjust stab trim manually. It is pretty easy really."
Not under the conditions the accident crews were dealing with, it isn't.
At high speed, with the H-stab trimmed nose-down and the elevators positioned in an attempt to pull the nose up, the forces on the stabilizer made it somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible to operate the trim wheels manually.
Add the low-altitude factor and you have a recipe for exactly what happened.
Check the pilot forums, the aviation press and, especially, the YouTube videos of Mentour Pilot, for some background information that will likely convince you to stop blaming the crews.
30
@JABUSSE I hear a lot of armchair expertise here, delivered in a maddeningly smug manner. You should look at the simulation based on the flight recorder. It is a total cop-out to be a patsy for a manufacturer that installed a software fix to hide an engineering problem without even informing the pilots. Arrogance right there.
12
@JABUSSE When the pilots of the largest airline go eyeball to eyeball with you and say "you've got a problem", then you've got a problem.
14
their shareholders were more important to them than their passengers... plus they thought they could just put the blame on the indonesian airline... they once used to be this great & trusted jetliner manufacturer... no longer and never again...
16
Can anyone describe the contents of the Emergency AD the union was pushing for at the meeting? It wasn't described in the article.
2
Humility is an undervalued quality in the United States. Humility could have gone a long way toward saving lives had there been humility in Boeing's response rather than bluster. Here we having a looming battle in 5G technology and the number one issue is trust, where there are very good reasons to have deep concerns. Certainly China cannot be trusted so American officials puzzle why the ban against Huawei is not more broadly accepted. I think part of the answer is that there are also very great levels of distrust in the United States which fails to respect hard won treaties (Iran), which turned Saddam Hussein from an ally into an enemy by allowing him to walk blindly into the first Gulf War after not giving any answer from the first President Bush when he asked permission to invade Kuwait. And always in the US, short or long term commercial interests are at risk of Trumping all other considerations as in this Boeing fiasco. So although China is definitely untrustworthy, you have to hope you won't loose your back teeth dealing with the US. Security concerns mean you have to keep you eyes on everyone! But I prefer to ride on airbus going forward because character matters.
16
@Charles M airbus relies too heavily on computerized flight. "flying by wire", Boeing flight control maintains more "human" (pilot) input to flight control, I think. For this reason alone, I would prefer a Boeing-made airplane than European. Of course, Boeing has always relied on the excellent training American commercial pilots received from military duty. European aircraft manufacturers have no such platform to rely on and so, out of necessity, they had to incorporate more computer-assisted flight control. I'm sure this is only one factor being considered, or not at all.
American Airlines also looks bad. They definitely should have grounded 737 MAX after 2nd crash, and probably should have grounded it after first
6
@Kevin Keep in mind no one from American crashed or even had a problem they considered major. Those reports only came after the Ethiopian Crash. Before the Crash, nothing. American pilots are fantastic. What boeing is doing is idiotproofing the controls.
1
@JABUSSE,
How quickly you forget. Even after the second crash, American was one of the US airlines that still refused to ground their fleet until they were shamed into it by all of the other worldwide airlines that had already put customer safety first and grounded their fleets immediately.
9
A regulated market economy can prevent this sort of dissembling and murder-by-negligence. However, proper due diligence costs time and money, which is why a Republican or Libertarian can never be trusted to do the right thing.
The Utopian Freedom Gospel preaching hatred of the rule of law since Reagan is to blame for this, Trump, and a generation of warmongers. The US must thoroughly clean house, or lose all pretense of being anything but profiteering scofflaws.
As things stand, time to move the UN headquarters outside the US, melt down the Statue of Liberty for scrap, and edit out the US national flag anthem from any media that can be viewed outside the country. Bad influence.
11
There is one thing wrong with the assumption that pilots were already trained to handle the malfunction scenario at the root of the two max crashes.
I thought the same until I dug deeper into the MCAS system and how it works, the problem is it moves the horizontal stabiliser faster than the normal trim system (this is no small detail).This means if the pilots are slow to disable the system it can get the airplane into a trim condition that no pilot can counter without employing some extreme flying skills most were never taught (I include myself in that group). Imagine all this happening while you are somewhat low to the ground while troubleshooting a system that seems intent on killing you. I don't think any 737 max pilot should get back into these airplanes without a good hour of sim time experiencing the exact scenario that both the lion air and Ethiopian crews experienced. I know if I was flying the 737 max I would want to do this and even pay for it myself if I had too!
24
@Chris
Exactly! The only way to survive this situation would be a half-roll into an inverted position.
Somehow I can't imagine that this is what the flight manual would actually say.
9
@Chris The ethiopian pilots disabled the system, the plane climbed then they turned it back on and the plane dived. Your thinking forgets, had they kept the system off as the instructions say and the AD reinforced the pilot would have simply continued to climb out after they turned the system off the first time. The co pilot would have nulled the elevator force using the manual trim wheel, exactly what the AD says and exactly how basic 737 training teaches. Imagine being on the ground and you do an experiment. Put your hand over the stove burner and turn it on. If if burns the "instructions" say Turn it off leave it off. OK So you turn it off, the burn stops, so you turn it on again. etc. Boeing assumed the pilots were qualified. having a 200 hour pilot in the right seat is not help, it is a liability. Don't believe me? Think what if the pilot had a heart attack. See how wrong you are. We all are due a totally competent crew. We demand that in the USA. Big difference in other parts of the world.
2
@JABUSSE
Regardless, it was an inherently faulty system that out the flight into an unstable configuration to begin with. That the pilots were unable to resolve that situation on the fly is a different issue. Reasons may have been increased workload combined with confusion on what to do.
Perhaps all they needed to do was push the yoke forward and reduce power after switching off the MCAS. I.e. just fly the plane.
That is harder to do than one might think, unless one regularly trains in a single engine plane and learns to fly by the seat of the pants. Feeling and predicting how the plane is going to behave without having to scan countless gauges is priceless in such a situation. It is fairly easy to preempt the stall coming on if you know how the plane feels and sounds at any given moment.
6
PLA agents fighting a trade war. That’s what brought those two planes down.
3
What really boggles my mind is - Boeing owned the single aisle 6 seat B737 airplane segment for decades till Airbus came along with the A319/320. The first B737 came out in 1964. Since then Boeing has tweaked the B737 to lengthen the plane , more passengers, new engine, new cockpit, slight changes to the wing, etc, etc.
Each new version was a re-spin of an older design over a 50 year period. Every engineer knows that at some point you just have to stop with the re-spin game. At some point you have to dump the old design and do a clean sheet design because they are just too many compromises in re-spinning an existing design, and those compromises become a game of diminishing returns in and of itself.
So why didnt Boeing bite the bullet, and do a complete clean sheet re-design with the single aisle B737 segment ? A clean sheet design would have meant no need to move the engines closer to the body and so no need for MCAS.
23
@Matt Phil One word..... money!
16
>>> "So why didnt Boeing bite the bullet, and do a complete clean sheet re-design with the single aisle B737 segment?"
Boeing was going to do just that. Then, Airbus announced the A320 Neo, with increased fuel efficiency that was likely going to cut Boeing's share of the market segment. Boeing decided there was not enough time to get a new aircraft design to market, so they reconfigured the 737, yet again.
5
@Douglas
THE 737 IS 30 YEAR OLDER THAN A320 BY DESIGN
probably due for a refresh. this mcdonnel douglas executive team will be caught sleeping at the wheel multiple times in the future if they aren't let go. only question is which ones of us are they driving off a cliff next??
3
I am a member of the flying public with close to 2 million recorded miles acquired while seated in the cabin. I am expert on the timing of snack service and relative benefits of each cabin class in finding overhead bin space for my luggage. I read the safety card in the seat back pocket on each flight I board and linger over the cartoon drawing of the plane settled carefully on placid ocean waters as passengers float politely in the rubber raft. Thus the extent of my technical experience with airplanes and the systems that support them.
So from my simple understanding, the MCAS, intended to run "surreptitiously in the background" was installed on the 737 MAX to compensate for (and hide) an unstable, potentially (and eventually) catastrophic design. The software "fix" exacerbated the design error, and pilots were not trained to recognize the cause of any "problems" the software provoked.
I don't expect any rigorous holding to account for Boeing or for the FAA. But someone needs to change those safety card cartoons in the seat back pocket so they tell the terrifying truth for those skilled pilots, crew and trusting passengers who were collateral damage for cynical, fearful employees of Boeing who took short cuts with people's lives.
37
Even with the news, captured in an audio recording, no sign of accountability with culpability. Boeing CEO remains in his job by saying Boeing is hurt deeply, "hey, world, we are the victim!" while blaming the pilots of the accidents. Then Boeing makes the pilot union to come out and say its members have reservations as revealed in this recording.
After 2 deadly accidents, Boeing CEO has only one press conference. And now two VPs and a lobbyist are the fall guys - and the FAA. Excuse me, the buck always stops at the top, sir!
14
@Bos; Oh, the FAA definitely shares a big piece of the responsibility, here. The agency has, increasingly, permitted the industry to self-regulate and provided less and less active oversight.
9
The American model in Aerospace/Defense, post Cold War, seems to be emerging as a worrying strategic weakness.
With only "two and a half" major competitors left on the defense side (Boeing, Lockheed Martin & Northrop Grumman), fat contracts are guaranteed into the future, risking that the civilian side become a "red-haired step child".
On the civilian side, following Boeing's takeover of McDonnell Douglas - and with the Chinese not quite up to par yet - the only competitor is Airbus.
These two factors have surely caused complacency at Boeing. The original decision to tweak a warmed over 737 into the "Max" rather than develop a new aircraft from scratch as Airbus did, combined with the poor handling of the crisis has essentially put our country at risk. Will the world begin to think of Boeing the way we have historically derided Aeroflot? And what will happen whent the Chinese have a viable jet?
It is in circumstances like this where the checks and balances provided by the French model (with the State owning a minority share of strategic conglomerates - with a seat on the board) or the German model (with the Union guaranteed a seat on the board) may prove to be a more viable model to safeguard a national asset, even treasure.
20
The smoking gun will be the emails between engineers when MCAS was in development questioning whether it was safe or even prudent to have a single source of data drive a system that was critical to safety of flight. I'm sure they exist.
11
@Chris Dual source probably would have prevented these accidents. No doubt about it. But AC accidents are most often if not always the result of far more than one thing going wrong. A dual input system could still malfunction. In the end the pilot should have recognized the problem and simply switched the system off. According to the Ethiopian record that is exactly what they did when it first dived. but then they turned it on again after the plane started the climb with the system off. They failed to follow the procedure that says Turn it off, leave it off. In the end it is up to the pilots to recover from easily recoverable equipment failures no matter how remote the chances of the the problem are.
1
@JABUSSE It should have had 3 sources not just two that is how it is done on other aircraft. Im a pilot so I understand the system fairly well, but the Ethiopian pilots turned the system back on because they could not get the manual trim wheel to move because aerodynamic pressure caused by the high speed they had achieved. Yes they could have pulled the power back and that would have helped somewhat, but a little known maneuver called the roller coaster believe it or not, that I believe dates back to the 60s is what would have worked if you have enough altitude to play with and its doubtful they did. Google it and you should find some discussion forums for pilots referring to it.
2
Don't forget Republicans and especially Trump think all regulations are bad and we should be left to market forces as a form of regulation. Just think of this as you walk down the jetway for your next flight. And remember that feeling when you go to vote next time.
19
The whole idea of Artificial intelligence scares the heck out of me. Talking about these tragedies with a friend, I repeated from news reports that it was a flaw in the programing that caused the problem. He responded that the pilots should have been able to deal with whatever the program did so it was pilot error. Why do we trust a program designed by we don't know who, doing we don't know what, over human beings? Why are we so eager to rush into the Matrix? I don't know a single person who hasn't had computer problems at home and work, but we're ready to put our lives into the "hands" of these devices. Self driving cars? Please NO!!!
6
The article and some comments refer to a software fix.
The issue is that the software reacts given the readings from a single angle-of-attack sensor.
Triple redundancy is the standard for flight-critical *hardware*, which means that, of three physical sensors, two must agree.
This is not a software issue.
8
@EW
You are principally right, there would have been no problem with appropriate sensor redundancy. Because there would have been no trigger condition for nosedive. But the software update changes the relentlessness of the original version which is unfazed by any pilot counter-action - the "tug of war" the LION crew lost. Maybe they even allow other data input to MCAS to cross-check for sensor data reliability. In the Ethopian scenario the faulty data from the one angle-of-attack sensor on which the MCAS acted was absurdly at odds with the actual position of the plane, like more than 60 degrees difference! There should be other data available in such a situation to confirm that the current sensor data cannot be trusted.
6
@Andre Welling Every time the plane climbed after the fault all the crew had to do was turn off auto trim and leave it off. Regardless of fault that is all they had to do. Just like the manual says. Just like the AD says. The published fix fixed all conditions of stab runaway not just MCAS. Something that fixes all conditions is easier to implement and much easier to understand than specific fixes for specific issues. The ultimate thing that made the plane go down was the automatic control of the horizontal Stab. MCAS was one thing that is channeled through automatic control Turn off auto control = immediate problem solved. It was that easy.
@EW Clearly this was not considered flight critical during the design and qualification, otherwise it would have had duel sensor input. The recovery system was old tried and true and understood by any pilot fully qualified in the 737. When this happened twice to US company aircraft the pilots reported the problem after they landed. Their fix was the old stab runaway recovery of turning off auto stab and trimming manually and continuing the flight. So there might have been some confusion on system categorization. Now they are trying to make the system idiot proof and the "fix" is being designed in a crucible of eyes. I think the goal is better passenger feelings. Remember every time the plane climbed (8 times) all they needed to do was turn the system off and let the co pilot null the trim force using the trim wheel. At least according to the reports thus far.
Americans, I am sure, gasp in disbelief when they watch the HBO drama Chernobyl. How could senior officials of the state prioritize public relations ahead of public safety?
In the months and years to come we will see revealed gasp inducing information surrounding the actions of senior Boeing executives, proving of course, that we’re all the same.
I feel for the lower level employees who wanted to say something but were gagged by threats of professional ruin from what has become a totalitarian industrial nightmare.
20
Europeans rubbing their hands over a potential windfall for Airbus are facing the uncomfortable truth that Boeing aren't going to suffer much of a commercial hit over the 737 Max.
Not just because these sort of aircraft contracts are notoriously difficult to get out of, but because - even if airlines turned away from Boeing - there's zero chance Airbus could accommodate even a tiny fraction of the additional orders.
If it was Airbus that had messed up (and, as Boeing's nemesis that's perfectly possible), the situation would be exactly the same - Boeing couldn't take up the extra work, either.
There doesn't seem to be any benefit from a duopoly here. The world's travellers are at the mercy of big corporates.
5
I will never fly the 737 MAX again, no matter what they do to fix it. In consideration for all the lives lost.
20
Firstly, prayers to all 346 souls lost.
Without MCAS (and with a faulty MCAS or a faulty AoAs), the MAX is unstable during take off and is very risky for a plane ferrying people. Boeing assumed that MCAS is simple and that it would work. FAA simply trusted Boeing and gave up on their sacred oversight role. The lawmakers too ignored the fact that the relationship between these two was too good for comfort.
What’s shocking is that the MCAS uses input only from a SINGLE AoA sensor instead of 2 and it alternates after each power on/off cycle. This is why Lion Air maintenance crew checked the good AoA sensor and cleared it as they weren’t made aware of MCAS or how it swaps inputs at every power on/off cycle.
Several US pilots have also anonymously reported at the NASA website regarding trim issues in MAX.
Boeing has accepted that “the disagree alert was intended to be a standard feature on MAX. However, the disagree alert was NOT operable on ALL MAX planes because the feature was NOT activated as intended”.
Southwest Airlines was surprised as they thought that Disagree Alert was a part of standard kit like in 800 NG.
All this shows that the MAX has serious design issues.
Boeing is still finding out the cost of suppressing critical information.
Once respected Boeing has also fallen into the corporate greed trap.
Will the fare paying passenger’s lives be respected again? Ultimately, aren’t they the reason that companies like Boeing exists?
19
when beancounters take over (as they have all of corporate America....the lackeys of Wall St.)
9
Why are all these amoral executives still on the payroll???
20
@mwugson mcdonnell douglas boys' club and bribes. i bet there's a boeing office in all 50 states. mostly to distribute bribes.
4
Elaine Chao and her husband Mitch McConnel are nearly at the end of their life. One would assume they have nano grams of integrity to do the right thing before they meet there maker. Apparently not.
10
I picked my summer flights to avoid the MAX aircraft. This is clearly a case where the "fox" is living in the "hen house" in that the FAA is staffed by former Boeing employees. The company's arguments are all about the GD bottom line. Now they are caught. Does the company decision not to inform pilots and airline companies mean hundreds have died because of profit? Wonder how those MAX 737 designers are sleeping at night?
11
Our safety in the hands of Boeing, only God can save us.
5
Profit over innocent lives. How many dead passengers does it take to get them to do the right thing?
12
@Kenny Any airline could have bought the panel light two sensor option. So who's profit are you t alking about? The one that says the system is not important enough to include as standard? (and remember no US carrier had problems with it) or the one that puts a 200 hour neopilot in the right seat and prays the pilot doesn't get food poisoning or have a heart attack? You tell me who to sue? Is offering the base model car without side mirrors the problem, knowing you might sell to bushmen who would never use them, Or is not buying a system that overcomes the inadequacy of your pilots the problem. Did you buy the optional ceiling air bags for your car? If you crash and your passengers are crushed, do they sue you for crashing the car or Ford for not making standard an option that may have saved them if you crashed the car. make it personal and it is easier to see the Boeing process. Everyone at Boeing flys Boeing planes. Them, their friends and family. So make it personal.
It may be that rhe federal government needs to investigate Boeing and pursue criminal procecution of responsible Boeing officials. No corporate shield for corporate officers. Prison time for negligent homicide should be on the table. Shame on the greedy Boeing officials.
28
This is what happens when the MBAs, lawyers, marketers and PR flacks spend enough time around engineers that they start believing that they – and not the engineers – are capable of making design decisions. There’s a management arrogance and worship of money that runs through Anglophone culture that is rotting it from the inside out.
23
How does this differ from the VW Diesel Scandal?
(other than the direct causal relationship to death!)
2
@Unglaublich
Is that a serious question? Or, just an attempt at blame deflection?
There's an important difference. VW was a criminal conspiracy to cheat at standards testing - not to influence, to game, - as Boeing has done - the standards.
Organised crime vs arrogant, incompetent recklessness.
Does that make you feel better?
2
I’m a Systems Analyst. Been at it for 40 years. Started with IBM and was trained the Right way.
Question: How can you develop a system (MCAS), that is only activated via a sensor reading And not flight test that activation.
Folks, that is impossible. I’ll bet it Was tested and the pilot had to switch it off. I’ve read Boeing has spent $1B rewriting MCAS. Were they too greedy to get it right in the first place?
7
@Alex Milton
Is that really correct?
Only, I couldn't find, anywhere, the allegation that MCAS 'wasn't flight tested'. Certainly, there are reports that 'updated' and 'revised' flight testing has been undertaken on the modified MCAS system, but that isn't relevant to your claim.
The allegation isn't that MCAS hadn't been 'tested' by Boeing but that the company chose, essentially for financial reasons, to keep very, very quiet about the existence of it - and that this decision cost the lives of some 300 people.
I agree that it's pretty unlikely that Boeing didn't test MCAS. They would have tested every other system on that model. All aircraft manufacturers from Airbus down to makers of squitty hobby planes would have done.
2
@Alex Milton It was flight tested and certified. The stab runaway procedure was flight tested. Pilot reports supported the flight testing and noted that when it happened it was a minor annoyance not a major problem. I have no idea where you got the idea otherwise.
This same moral issue is the crux of Arthur Miller's All My Sons now playing on Broadway with a stellar cast - Annette Bening, Tracy Letts and Benjamin Walker. How do these Boeing executives who greenlighted this clearly defective system sleep at night? There must be accountability.
5
@CEJNYC
I'm not sure it is - although there are similar issues. The conspiracy in the play is much, more more sinister and reprehensible. It'd be a pity if a venerable US company got coincidentally tarred with an American playwrights brush.
American writers are justifiably popular in the English Language and English Literature exam syllabus of British schools. My son's 'Drama and Theatre' High School module did 'All My Sons'. I can't remember which part he played but I sure felt I'd had to learn about the play.
1
Disgusting.
Yet one more example of profit and earnings taking the prime position over, well, everything. Including life.
Boeing has violated every tenet of the trust they had earned and that was granted to them.
This is going to have a massive impact in the opposite direction with staggering losses economically for the company and more importantly for the literally millions of people in the world who relied on Boeing Aircraft, systems and production for their livelihoods in one way or another.
Was it worth it Boeing?
7
The Boeing CEO and other executives involved in these decisions should be prosecuted for depraved heart murder for their conduct. They were well aware of the risk of death if these planes crashed and they ignored it. Death resulted, depraved indifference. Where are those courageous prosecutors who will take on this type of corporate behavior that kills?
8
Boeing is a house of cards now.
Dysfunctional executives and board.
Game over. Airbus wins!
5
Just flew to Europe and was very happy to be on an Airbus. Would prefer to buy American but not in this case.
6
In the 737 Max, Boeing placed the large turbofan engines in the wrong spot on the fuselage, for a reason that was ultimately marketing-based. The software fix is like putting lipstick on a pig.
The Max concept was ill-conceived from the beginning, and a fundamental betrayal of engineering integrity. I will never set foot in a Max - they should be removed from passenger service, and Boeing's CEO and upper management needs to go.
12
@Steve R psssst (the engines are on the wings not on the fuselage.) Take a look. From the top view the fuselage is the kind of round thingy that has two big flat things called wings protruding from it. If you don't know the difference, maybe you shouldn't fly.
@JABUSSE
That was a typo. The wings were placed in the wrong spot on the fuselage, partly due to the clearance the turbofan engines needed from the ground, and partly because of the extended length of the fuselage.
1
Don't travel on a Boeing 737 until Boeing have issued an apology for their reckless behaviour and proof that they have resolved the situation beyond putting the onus onto the pilots.
3
This sort of stonewalling by Boeing well after the problems are obvious is far too often the default position in companies as diverse as Enron and Boeing. Their inability to face their responsibilities indicates their lack of integrity.
11
Boeing needed a new more fuel efficient plane, fast. They saved time and money by just modifying an old model. The new larger engines had to go too far forward, making the plane unstable. Software to correct this problem depended on an unreliable sensor. The pilots were not told about about the new software, told how to override it when the sensor value was wrong, or given a chance to practice in a simulator. And the override was unlikely to work anyway due to another change in the new plane, making the crashes inevitable. All to save money. Boeing stock has tripled in recent years. So far, several hundred have died in two unnecessary crashes. As a potential passenger, I think this trade-off by Boeing is terrifying.
11
There was a movie, “ No Highway in the Sky (1951)”, which depicts the road not taken in this tragic case. The main character of this movie postulates a flawed design after a deadly crash and although no one agees with him a test is ordered before another crash can occur. The test proves the engineer correct and unknown lives are saved. The character, played by James Stewart, took a professional risk to demand the test. In this Boeing MAX case, the risk was placed on the flying public and flight crews.
6
Now it’s known that after the first crash, Boeing was advised by experienced pilots to ground their MAX, but Boeing VP Sinnett refused to go along directly leading to another tragic crash. Even then, the Boeing President called Trump to assure him that the MAX was safe. When huge errors of judgement like this are made, it means that Boeing has to make management changes. There has to be accountability. None of that will bring any of the 346 dead back to life. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that the MCAS system, secretly placed on the MAX, was a marketing ploy.
8
Of course the Boeing executives and their software team will want to be the first to ride the 737 max when it is approved for return to service. . . Just to demonstrate their confidence in their decisions this time.
5
A scandal of international proportions. I believe that the situation has attained a point where Boeing needs to be nationalized and placed under US military control in light of the blatant lack of oversight and responsible management at the very summit of what was once known as an admired name in aeronautics. Tolerating the status quo would be nothing less than criminal.
10
Haven't we seen this before? Remember the space shuttle Challenger disaster inflicted by the same profit motivated corporate thinking from Morton Thiokol? The investigation revealed, "...the failure of both NASA and its contractor, Morton Thiokol, to respond adequately to the design flaw."
Or how about the gas tank fires on Ford's Pinto? "The safety issues surrounding the Pinto and the subsequent response by Ford have been cited widely as a business ethics as well as tort reform case study."
The examples abound, yet we continue to allow large corporations to jeopardize innocent lives so shareholders and corporate executives can realize greater profits and pay.
7
@ibmindless
Times sure have changed since 1982, the year when Tylenol was the target of an unsolved psychopathic crime involving cyanide placed in painkiller capsules which led to the deaths of unsuspecting customers. This tragedy triggered a rapid response on the part of Tylenol involving a tamper-proof design change for the capsules. Now contrast this with the lackadaisical attitude of Boeing today !
5
So rather than taking the necessary conscientious position, Mr. Sinnett deliberately and forcefully pushed back - even selling his position to these concerned pilots by considering what he’d be risking if there was another crash. I imagine this
What now then? The Samurai had an honorable tradition for such situations but I shouldn’t digress.
This Boeing executive and his superiors remind me of so much of the ilk I found myself around in corporate America. Their giant egos and relentless win-at-all-cost attitude seems highly coveted by large public corporations where they’re groomed to get to the top. Whatever sense of humanity they have left by then probably gets muzzled by Wall Street manifestos, bigger egos and perhaps even bigger fears of failure (after all, it’s a long way down from there). I only hope all those accountable at Boeing and the regulating agency are brought to task for these tragedies
10
@Robbie D
Don't forget greed also as a motivating factor.
2
The government needs to act on this, but consumers also need to take a stand like some commentators have suggested. Boycott the plane. Refuse to fly on it, and let the airlines flying them know what you are doing. I am not sure that Boeing deserves to survive this debacle.
21
As a non-pilot, and also not an aeronautical engineer I have relied on the articles written by others with these expertise.
At least part of what I have gleaned is that this is an adapted aircraft from a preexisting plane, put in to service in a significantly shorter period of time, and for significantly less cost than a new ground up, purpose built aircraft.
It sounds like several times a solution to a problem created another problem downstream.
Seems like designing and testing a new purpose built aircraft has significant advantages of the decision route taken with this plane.
It is very difficult for consumers to impact these decisions, as the scale of these industries, like aircraft production are so massive.
It is critical that we can have faith in and trust fully the decision making process.
Boeing failed the public.
6
This is horrifying. A sordid tale of how safety and good sense were repeatedly sacrificed at the altar of commercial interests, aided by a regulator steeped in benign neglect.
This dismaying sequence of events once again underlines that airline safety is too important to be left to one or two commercial or government entities. As I’ve suggested in previous comments in these columns, aircraft should need approvals from a multilateral agency composed of several competing aircraft makers, airlines and national regulators.
An interesting aside: “No one has yet to conclude that the sole cause of this was this function on the airplane,” Mr. Sinnett said. He’s admitting that everybody knew where the fault was ! A Freudian slip, if there ever was one !!
6
Interesting Boeing went down the path of developing software that is supposed to automate corrections to pilot error. That is the assumption behind this technology--that the software is more dependable than pilot judgment. What Boeing forgot to do is develop software to correct for human error in engineering and management decisions.
8
Where are the murder charges? I realize that these were foreign crashes, thus involving fewer of the important people (Americans), but Boeing's management should have been led away in handcuffs by this point.
All Boeing cares about is shareholder and C-Suite wealth. Doing the right thing is almost comical to suggest anymore.
19
@Plennie Wingo
There won't be any 'murder' charges. Causing death is only murder in the presence of intent. Even the US, which recognises 'degrees' of murder (unlike many other legal jurisdictions elsewhere), the presence of 'intent' is necessary.
Plainly, nobody at Boeing intended to kill plane passengers - even if that was the consequence of the actions.
Manslaughter, involuntary homicide or whatever. Not murder.
1
Nothing get done in this country until there are bodies are on the ground. I do not know why anyone is surprised.
8
In my opinion, the 737 Max is already a dead plane landing. Boeing appears to have fundamentally altered the 737's airworthiness with the new engine placement on the old airframe, and then sought to compensate for the resulting instability with a software package that concealed that danger. It compounded the error by relying on one angle of attack sensor while in flight. The MCAS was a death trap waiting to spring. I'm not sure the current engine/ airframe configuration will survive. Boeing may need to design a whole new aircraft to replace the 737 MAX, which is something it should have done ten years ago. I will never set foot on a 737 Max.
17
HBO is currently airing a blood-curdling series on Chernobyl. It is sad to see the similarities between Soviet bureaucratic GroupThink and US corporate dominance of what should be independent government regulators.
Government regulation is popularly conceived as a bad thing—until you die unnecessarily in an unsafe airplane or from an inadequately tested drug.
19
Boeing has/had one competitor yet greed was the deciding factor in its attempt to turn a 50 year old narrow body aircraft into a cheap version of a long haul 747 with two engines- far too large for a skinny fuselage. Boeing engineers were well aware of the inherent flaw but no one (that we know) raised alarms.
Soon enough, I suspect there will be serious leaking of internal emails, memos and conversations. Whether our Justice Department or Federal Aviation Authority has the will to investigate in today's climate of "too big to prosecute"- is anyone's guess.
20
The account of this meeting, along with the previous one of the lobbyist Moloney's meeting with the flight attendants paints a clear picture of a corporation that feels no accountability to anybody. And they haven't even bothered to talk to passengers. Of course, the government, whose job it is to protect the interests of the traveling public, are so captured by industry that they are just as uninterested. The marketplace rules and it's always right.
13
We have just flown to Europe via Asia, after first carefully checking which planes would be used. There is no way I am ever getting on a Boeing again. Those terrible crashes are their fault. Even if we made it safely to our destination -not a given, clearly, with Boeing- I would be fearful and sweating for the whole journey. Not worth it.
9
@Lisa Yours is an understandable but not a rational choice. Overall, Boeing and Airbus have very similar safety records. Three Boeing planes, the 717, 747-8 and 787, have never had a single accident. Boeing deserves all the criticism it is getting for the 737 MAX, but that's no reason not to fly in Boeing aircraft generally.
1
@Michael Brower I beg to differ, you should be very afraid to get on BOEING airplane. These corporations are process driven, flaw like the one on MAX tells that the company as a whole has failed not "a" product.
Similar to MAX the 777-X is also built along the same line. If the process is flawed then every product built on the same principle is likely flawed.
6
@Michael Brower I think the issue here goes beyond the safety record of this single aircraft
Michael I certainly agree that their aircraft prior to this have been as safe as any other..
This however speaks to the company's response to the problem, and its inept handling of the ensuing fall out.
The correct response (in my opinion) would have been to immediately ground the fleet and resolve the problem (- and it appears they were aware there was one)
They chose however to continue not just allowing the aircraft to fly but in fact continued to produce them at a veracious speed.
In doing so they have tarnished the credibility of any product they produce...sadly so as I personally view the 747 as one of the more beautiful aircraft still in service.
Their handling of the crisis smacks of being callous and their apologies seem superficial and forced.
The unfortunate reality is when the public deem a company to have been frugal with the truth iro one of their products, they then begin to call into question anything else the company may say..
Ergo - "If Boeing kept this from the public, what else could they be keeping from us"
8
"Also, extra training will be required for pilots, although the nature of that training is not settled. Boeing is pushing for computer-based tutorials that would be much quicker than training sessions in flight simulators." - AP, May 13
Boeing is still in maximum denial, short-term money-first corporate mode. Still doesn't get it, and "it" is its long-term credibility and corporate viability. There used to be a saying around here, "If it ain't Boeing, I'm not going." Now, should it be "If it's Boeing, I'm not going?"
I'm sure the Max will be relatively safe to fly in once it's allowed to return to the sky, but my surety is based pretty much on the fact that there's now been extra scrutiny (proper scrutiny?) and attention paid to its air-worthiness. But the slip-shod Boeing corporate culture exposed by this tragedy and other serious quality control problems such as with the 787 and the KC-46 make me now wonder about the other airplanes. And as a taxpayer, I feel there should be scrutiny applied to all of Boeing's government contracts and question whether there should be a revolving-door Boeing exec sitting in the SecDef chair.
9
Boeing has repeatedly withheld critical information from the FAA, from its customers, from its customers' pilots, and from the American public. Boeing has repeatedly misrepresented information to the FAA, to its customers, to its customers' pilots, and to the American public. And the Boeing CEO has lied to all of the above when he claimed there were no design deficiencies in the 737 MAX 8. If there are no design deficiencies, why is Boeing fixing the design? And then why is the plane grounded?
Boeing's commitment to safety is non-existent, and Boeing's reputation is in tatters. And no one at Boeing seems to know this.
16
@Safe upon the solid rock Strikingly similar to the Trump Administration. Is there something in the water the power cohort is drinking? Or is it the devolving American Ethic?
3
I refused to fly on 737s after they had a couple of unexplained crashes in the late 80s-early 90s. Flew over the site of one of them, and I said that's it for me. Haven't been on one since then. Take heart: Corporate America is working on a 737 Max fix with the firm approval of You Know Who. Caveat emptor.
6
@The King
We shouldn't forget those crashes. Rumours circulated that the basic 737 wasn't safe - that it would suddenly plunge out of control with disastrous consequences. This was denied and denied again by Boeing. Turned out it WAS true and it was only through good luck and excellent flying that the truth was found and yet another dreadful disaster avoided.
Boeing didn't suffer much because the fault lay with (as was then) Parker-Hannifin who supplied a crucial hydraulic part that under unusual conditions didn't behave as the company specified.
For years, I had a creeping sense of dread flying on any 737. But, in the absence of proof and in the face of Boeing's denial, I was largely dismissed as a crank.
4
Time for Boeing to admit it needs a from the ground up newly designed 797 that flies straight without software.
7
I would never trust a software "fix" for a hardware deficiency...it is not a rational decision on Boeing's part and a radical departure from their historical company culture. It's no longer "caveat emptor" but "flyer be very wary".
16
The manual was dumbed down, lacking instruction on how to cope with robo-nose-down. If the steps on how to go to manual control hadn't been omitted, a few pilots would have plowed through the whole thing and alerted others who skipped reading it. But Authority vs. Casandra - don't you tell us, we tell you. Refusal to listen leads to catastrophe.
12
My take on this is that I fly a lot, and I am going to do my level best to avoid Boeing aircraft. This all seems to stem from a culture of corporate greed including the opening of the union busting plant in South Carolina where a whistle blower has complained of widespread, shoddy workmanship. What difference does a union shop make? It means that workers can speak out without fear of losing their jobs. All products that can cause great loss of life should be required to be produced in union shops. This is truly sad. My dad flew a lot, and he always wanted to fly Boeing planes. It's terrible that corporate greed has squandered Boeing's good name for the false quest for shareholder value. The ironic thing is that their greed has done more to destroy that value than negotiating in good faith with unions would have.
30
The whole incident of 737 Max stinks of corporate greed and profits. The FAA especially is a bigger accomplice in this tragedy as they kept mum even after these tragedies unfolded. What is more baffling is that Boeing ignored recommendation of using input from the two sensors and instead relied on one.
The funny thing is a man charged with manslaughter is given death penalty but in this case where there is clear negligence shown by Boeing Management, why have they not been charged with voluntary manslaughter? Its time America puts a check on corporate greed. The same happened in the 2008 mortgage crisis where the common man paid the price whereas the real culprits got bailout packages from government.
31
@Sudheendra As a Richard Pryor character put it succinctly, "That's the politics, baby..."
2
A criminal with a gun who kills someone should get less time than a manager with a lobbyist who kills hundreds.
34
@Harris Silver This is America.
2
Why aren't prison terms being discussed? Or is it it only for common citizens who kill a couple of people? Talk about losing your moral compass.
44
If it Boeing I ain’t going,
17
Sounds to me like Boeing is doing what the car companies were doing in the movie "Fight club". The cost of correcting and admitting an error against the cost of living with avoidable crashes. At the end of the day, the money made from the sales of the 737 Max will offset the money they will have to pay from the lawsuits against Boeing. With all the information coming from all sources, after the first crash, Boeing was aware something was seriously wrong with MCAS, all the freaking pilot associations were telling them so. Yet, they persisted...
21
I am so done with Boeing. I will only ever fly with them again if there is absolutely no other flight available.
I don't really care if Boeing fires Sinnet, Bomben, and the lobbyist. Those three did not meet with the pilots as private individuals. They were there representing Boeing management, and in that role they argued forcefully that money is more important to the company than the lives of the plane's crew and passengers.
An airline that thinks that has serious problems, and not just physical ones. It's also one I will never willingly spend another dollar on.
23
We are seeing the natural progression of a free market society that has only a fiduciary responsibility to its citizens. Where is the societal responsibility of the corporation? There is none.
Of course Boeing produced an aircraft that cut corners to make more profit for the corporation despite the fact that it killed people. Their legal responsibility is to make money for their shareholders, not save lives. 'Let the buyer beware."
Now that the buyer knows that Boeing does not care about their lives, perhaps the buyer will no longer fly on Boeing airplanes. Perhaps the airlines will start looking elsewhere for their airplanes.
Perhaps there is a place for proper regulation of industry, just not in the US.
20
Boeing is Toast.
Every article makes it so clear that all they really cared about was selling aircraft.
They’ve made their bed. But I’m not lying in it.
22
Boeing put profits over people, pure and simple. I'm not flying on one of these even when they come back. I'll be looking at the equipment description on the flight before booking, and picking flights accordingly...
25
Time to make management criminally accountable for their role in putting profit over safety. What executives did at Boeing directly put passengers in harms way because their role was to protect profit not people.
22
As ex-Boeing employee, we calculate safety by number of departures before catastrophic failure. And number of safe departures runs in millions before any incidents in particular fir 737. For Boeing to claim that plane is safe after two catastrophic incident in short span of few months, is flat out lie and criminal. If I was in Boeing I would have recommended grounding of all 737 MAX. Maybe 737 "MAX" meant maximizing profit for the company. Its shrugging of and elitist attitude of "I know better than you" despite two crashes and floating the idea of "likely" pilot error sinks any confidence in their products.
32
As ex-Boeing employee, we calculate safety by number of departures before catastrophic failure. And number of safe departures runs in millions before any incidents in particular fir 737. For Boeing to claim that plane is safe after two catastrophic incident in short span of few months, is flat out lie and criminal. If I was in Boeing I would have recommended grounding of all 737 MAX. Maybe 737 "MAX" meant maximizing profit for the company. Its shrugging of and elitist attitude of "I know better than you" despite two crashes and floating the idea of "likely" pilot error sinks any confidence in their products.
2
Have you read the book review about the abuse in the drug industry? Is this any different?
Make more money. Kill a few people? Price of doing business. Make more money. Never tell the truth. Pay settlements, they are cheaper than fixing the planes or drugs or cars (remember the Pinto?or VW?)
The money goes to the CEO's and the shareholders, not the workers. The money talks. The FAA is in charge of regulating AND promoting the airline industry. There have always been conflicts of interest there.....how could there not be?
Who reads this info? The people who watch FOX? or Sinclair? The people who vote for Republicans who dismantle or weaken all government regulations at every opportunity? Who gains? The billionaire class. Lose a few pilots and some passengers here and there, no problem, as long as you can buy those $1,000 shoes and a fifth yacht. Argue with the pilots and the mechanics -- what can they do anyway?
Nothing changes. It just gets worse. The answer would be truth, education, openness, honesty and an absolute FEAR of greed. Not as long as we are a capitalist system......who will die next? Oh, yes, thoughts and prayers for those folks, many of whom will be wearing MAGA hats.
14
Our commitment to safety, profitability safety, is as good as yours
3
That such a system as the anti-stall mechanism at the heart of these two crash investigations was introduced into these aircraft and then pilots were not told about it is criminally willful, not just negligent.
The 737 is a 50+ year old design that has been patched and modified for decades. They tried lipstick on this pig in the 1980s, now it's a ball gown.
I am surprised that little coverage mentions the uncontrolled rudder problems that caused two 737s to crash in the 1990s. A very good friend died on USAir 427 in Pittsburgh. In that fiasco Boeing looked bad, but mostly because it dragged its feet in solving what was a real mystery. Here, the company knowingly made cynical decisions that directly killed hundreds of people.
27
This debacle shows we can't trust anything Boeing or the FAA says. You step on that plane and you are another lab rat that Boeing is using to defraud us with a plane that they don't have any idea whether it can fly. Boeing can't explain how the plane is supposed to fly because they don't know if it can or how they think it can. If you don't know how its supposed to fly, you can't test whether it can fly can you? Boeing has clearly demonstrated this and until this horrible executive rat pack is flushed out it's chance to avoid bankruptcy is fading faster than a plummeting 737 MAX.
16
Mike Sinnett, worked on the 787 before the 737.
Here's a link to an article of his change of position that worth reading...
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2013/07/26/boeing-promotes-787-engineer-sinnett.html
Is this guy a jinx?
5
On far more flimsy evidence, in my opinion, we have just seen Bayer / Monsanto fined $2 billion for two deaths which may or may not have been caused by Roundup. Multiply up, Boeing. Of course Bayer is a foreign company and I doubt that that entered into the decision of the jury. ([/s] for those who need it.)
5
Canada’s Justice Department’s prosecutors need to approve charges against Boeing and its CEO for criminal negligence causing death as would any hit and run driver would be in Canada. The silence on the criminality of Boeing on its deceit, failure to warn and train pilots, requiring an option for a safety feature and installing no redundancy with one sensor is appalling.
12
There should be a big huge button on the dashboard of all Max Aircraft: SWITCH TO MANUAL. That way, no matter how flawed the software is, no matter if the plane is hacked, no matter if you’re getting false readings, you can take full Control back. My uncle was a captain for TWA for 30 years, and he said that Autopilot had become highly dangerous because it made the pilot disconnected from the aircraft. In both of these crashes, the pilots were trying desperately to take control back from the computer. They ran out of time.
17
The Max airframe is so unstable that flying it manually would cause its nose to go up and create stall condition. That's why MCAS was created (it wrongly turned on in the crashes because of faulty AoAS), and why so many commenters who claim to be engineers, pilots, etc., are saying the design is bad and can't be fixed by software. I have no such specialized knowledge, an basing what I just said on articles and their comments. The comments sound right to me.
1
@Outdoors Guy not completely unstable, maneuvering characteristics augmentation system, it is done so the plane "feels" like an old 737 and hence is lying to pilot about how much control authority is remaining. this in turn was decided by boeing to save on training costs so 737 and max versions could use same certificate and no expensive pilot training.
1
From Boeing's point of view, what is worth more, money or lives? It is not like airplane buyers have other companies to go to. Yeah, Airbus, but their orders are backed up, too. I just wish Boeing would stop pretending they care and just change their motto to, "So What?"
9
I’m actually a aviation expert and have two points to make. The first is most commenters here have no expertise in aviation. The second is a airline pilot knows no more about the airplane they fly than a bus driver knows about buses.
My neighbor flys the B777 for a airline. On his last trip the captain could not get a engine to light off, the starter was spinning up the engine properly. This captain forgot to add fuel by throwing a switch. He also failed to follow the engine start checklist. Having the appropriate checklist in hand is a requirement. There were 300 people counting on that pilot’s “expertise”.
@Paulie
From what we have been told by the media, which isn't often accurate, the Ethiopian air pilot turned off the MCAS, per checklist,and it re-engaged automatically. It would be like that bus driver, who's been driving the exact same bus for twenty years, having the throttle stick wide open, because there manufacturer added an automatic cruise control and didn't tell anyone. Then, while the bus is accelerating towards a cliff, expect the bus driver to search for a solution in the manual! You don't allow someone to get familiar and comfortable with their equipment, and then make a change to it without telling them. How in the world would anyone know why it's behaving the way it is? Boeing did what they did, to prevent both a delay in getting it to market and to cut the cost of having it re-certified. Maybe they should have designed it to cut power, to drop the nose. At least the pilot would have a glide path. There's no gliding with the nose pointed down.
17
@Paulie "I’m actually a aviation expert and have two points to make. The first is most commenters here have no expertise in aviation. The second is a airline pilot knows no more about the airplane they fly than a bus driver knows about buses." Yes most commentators have no experience in aviation: but we do have experience of how some companies will deny that anything could be wrong. The pilot/bus driver analogy is idiotic: on one level because a bus driver generally knows a lot about his bus. But more importantly a commercial pilot is required to to know and understand a great deal about aerodynamics and the design of the specific plane s/he is responsible for. I really question that you are an 'aviation expert'; and your second point about your B777 driver neighbor is purely anecdotal and meaningless.
14
@Andrew We also have experience in union busting and corporate greed, and this smacks of both.
4
Boeing is busy rushing 777X to the market. Patch-work upgrade to 777 as was with 737 Max. As an ex Boeing employee i will strongly advise public to think twice before even thinking about flying in 777X.
12
@Alpha Who knows if you're a Boeing employee or not, Boeing is busy covering up their mistakes. They're definitely diverted from 777X.
1
When safety and short term profits are pitted against each other - sadly it is not a forgone conclusion that safety will win.
Capital markets unfortunately reward near sighted decision making for execs at public companies.
What these execs fail to understand however is that long term, the market will punish immoral behavior
8
Sinnett and these executives should be in jail. They chose profit over a safety risk and 157 dear souls paid the price.
The irony being that the plummet of orders and stock price that Boeing is now enjoying could have been avoided had safety been an unimpeachable priority. Their resignations should be demanded by every Boeing employee and shareholder.
May God forgive them.
21
Why does the CEO of Boeing still have his job? Boeing's response to this tragedy has been an an mitigated joke. Is no one in the executive suite capable of telling the truth?
35
The FAA certification of this badly designed plane should be immediately pulled. It was approved based on false pretenses, with Boeing either knowingly or unknowingly misleading the FAA. It is clear that the MAX was designed as a marketing stunt, an antique design pretending to be able to compete with the modern Airbus.
23
The families of the victims should Sue the company into bankruptcy, and the executives who refused to take steps should be imprisoned for negligent homicide.
26
Had Boeing done the right thing and accepted responsibility for the deaths of 189 people in the Lion Air crash it would have won the public’s respect and avoided the public-relations disaster it now faces. Instead it stonewalled, blaming the pilots and insisting that the Max 8 was safe, a response that cost the lives of another 157 people in the Ethiopian crash and squandered the goodwill the company has built up over many decades. Quite simply, Mr. Sinnett and his fellow executives at Boeing have blood on their hands, a conclusion the courts will almost certainly reach when they rule on the many lawsuits that have been filed by the families of the dead. Boeing will not survive this. Ultimately the company will be broken up and reconstituted in some other form. In the meantime, I will never fly on a Max 8 again, and I will be extremely reluctant to fly on any Boeing aircraft. I don’t think I’m alone.
33
So unbelievable that, even after having had this intense debate after the first crash, Boeing still hesitated to ground the aircraft after the second crash. What number do they have on the books for how many people need to die before it's a problem?
23
MCAS performed as (poorly) designed. Somehow the MCAS software specification took no account of AoA failure cases. Nor did it take in account airspeed threshold barriers. One would think something substantially less than Vmo (Maximum Operation Speed) would block MCAS. Then there's flight path angle and descent rate - surely no point shoving the nose down during an already steep descent. Yes, the MCAS operation was a success, but the passengers and crew died.
4
@GeorgeNotBush let's put some fancy screens up in front, all them rubes will think it's computer controlled! 500mph with all these bolt on hare-brain systems who'd've thought!
Boeing was losing market share to Airbus, who had designed an ariworthy plane that met market demand. Boeing's response was what? To rush a sub-par design into service with software to make up for the design flaw.
27
There should be a criminal investigation into Boeing's activities. If their negligence resulted in the deaths of the people on the 2nd plane, then those in charge should face serious jail time.
24
@David: There is a criminal investigation in progress. The FBI office in Seattle and the DOJ criminal division in Washington are in charge. Subpoenas are known to have been issued.
10
c/c++ software technology root of problem? Boeing 767 Software Certification Policy 1980 coauthor?
No, the root of the problem (other than the unstable airframe, of course) is the design of the software at the architectural level and the failure to tell airlines and pilots about the existence of the software, not with language choices or implementation.
If you design a system that can take control of the pitch of the aircraft on the basis of a single, fallible sensor, and give that system authority to fly the aircraft into the ground, it doesn't much matter what language you code in, or how elegant your coding may be.
19
@william payne Could you please elaborate?
The MCAS software was not flight tested before deployment. This says management failure of amazing proportions. Time for some people to lose their jobs. What else is lurking??
13
We don't actually know whether MCAS was flight tested. We can, however, be pretty sure that it wasn't tested by being activated by a failed sensor, at low altitude, immediately after takeoff.
We can be pretty sure of that because there were no reports of MAX 8s augering into the ground near Paine Field in Everett.
14
Seems greed won out over integrity and honesty. Maybe life in prison will give them time to think thinks over.
18
There are two truths demonstrated here.
1. Flight is entry into a hostile environment. Only the skill of the pilots and the design of the aircraft stand between a routine flight and catastrophe.
2. Corporations exist to make money.
22
There are two truths demonstrated here.
1. Flight is entry into a hostile environment. Only the skill of the pilots and the design of the aircraft stand between a routine flight and catastrophe.
2. Corporations exist to make money.
1
Truth 3. Corporate survival can be threatened by trying to make money by gambling with the lives of your clients.
8
This is absolutely horrifying to read. Even after two planes crashed and ~350 people lost their lives, they were still arguing the plane was safe. Boeing deserves every fine, sanction, and business loss coming their way for the arrogance they’ve shown in putting sales and profit ahead of human lives. I for one will never step foot on a 737 Max variant, ever.
40
I have close to million miles under my belt on Boeing 747's. I marveled at a wonderful airplane.
What happened Boeing?
22
@baldski greed
6
... was there a change in personal flight behavior after this meeting? Did they and their own families still fly with that aircraft type. If so, they honestly believed their own (wrong) words ....
6
Boeing: “You’ve got to understand that our commitment to safety is as great as yours,”
This apparently absurdist claim is quite probably true. Unfortunately, their commitment to safety was substantially offset by a commitment to deliver profits to stockholders, a conflict the pilots union did not share; or at least not to the same degree. Obviously Boeing was hoping nothing disastrous would happen in the interim. They gambled, and lost.
27
Bombardier's C-Series, now rebranded as the Airbus A220, is receiving accolades worldwide from airlines and passengers. It's a 21st century aircraft. As a Canadian, it grates me to no end that Boeing, with its tariff attack based upon the 737, a 50+ year old design, killed any chance that a Canadian company might chip away at the airframers duopoly.
30
@Andrew Collins
737MAX was receiving accolades until it crashed.
I wouldn't bet that Bombardier is different from Boeing or that Transport Canada operates in a different way than FAA.
@gct Fair comment. But there's still a 50 year difference in design. I know which I'd prefer to fly YYT-LHR.
1
Who will be the face to the country and the rest of the world to declare that the MAX is safe? POTUS? Elaine Chow? The FAA? The Boeing CEO? None of them are credible. Perhaps the European agency or a panel of pilots willing to put their prestige on the line.
A lot of blame to go around but Boeing clearly earning the majority of it. Time for clean sheet design?
24
Sue Pearlative is optimistic. It takes time to realize, even if warned, to recognize what is wrong and to execute all needed steps.
A proper engineering fix, used for similar high stress situations, as the space shuttle, is to use triple redundancy and majority voting. Three inputs, here angle-of-attack sensors, are needed and a divergent, failing one can be outvoted. The elevator actuators are then manged by the remaining pair. The pilots should still be warned, but to use the pilots visual or-seat-of-the pants as the third sensor and their minds and hands as actuator is poor engineering.
14
@Gio Wiederhold Boeing to pilots: You have five seconds to figure out the existence of software we have not mentioned to you, and that it has taken control of your aircraft. Depending on your altitude, you might have another twenty seconds to figure out corrective actions. You need to do all this while the aircraft is in a steep plunge, at the end of which is certain death. If you fail in any of these, we will claim pilot error.
20
It is sad to see such very bloody hands at Boeing.
How does that blood wash off? What kind of confession and penance would be sufficient?
I guess the first step is to admit they made mistakes. And I don't hear that.
26
How hard is it for a computer to identify a severely malfunctioning angle-of-attack sensor? It might take 100 milliseconds, but not 2 crashes. Something else is wrong with the programming that is not coming out yet.
Boeing execs are going to jail. The first is manslaughter. The second may be murder.
29
@Duncan McTaggart Good point. Were any America citizens killed? Realistically, you could see a manslaughter charge.
4
"No one has yet to conclude that the sole cause of this was this function on the airplane,”
So only if something is a sole cause - not merely a contributing cause - Boeing feels no need to do anything?
Amazing.
44
Complete exonoration for Boeing! Gravity at fault.
10
@Kevin Banker
"There was no collision!"
Ugh. Maybe it's time Boeing takes the "Tylenol" move? End the MAX program, remove the current jets from the skies.
The company will take a hit but ANY future flight control issues with the MAX will likely end more than just the MAX program itself.
15
@David The “Tylenol Move” should have been invoked when the first crash occurred. It definitely needed to be used when the second disaster happened. Absolutely NO reason to have ignored doing the right thing - grounding the line.
6
There are many folks here talking about engineering and what we should be talking about is complete cultural and management failure at Boeing and at FAA.
The plane business is an oligopoly - Boeing and Airbus. Neither Washington nor Brussels would hurt their own. In reality if multiple people at B don’t fave severe criminal punishments nothing would change.
20
Nothing short of criminal negligence charges against the top executives of Boeing will bring justice to the dead.
24
Numbers of readers have commented on the resistance of Mike Sinnett, the Boeing VP dismissals of to the urgings of American Airlines pilots, the people who actually experienced the 737 Max’s flaws aircraft, to urge the FAA to issue an emergency airworthiness directive and the potential grounding of the aircraft to update what was increasing seeming to be faulty software . . . software needed to compensate for what many have pointed out to be an overpowered aircraft design. And, several have noted Boeing’s unexplained, and, on the surface, completely inappropriate inclusion of a lobbyist . . . a person whose job it is to find political routes, not engineering routes to addressing design failures.
But, there are few mentions of the person where the buck is supposed to stop, the person who must have known about what was evolving into a corporate-life threatening disaster, Dennis Muilenburg Boeing’s president, chairman and chief executive officer.
Was there any relationship between Muilenburg’s seeming absence from the process combined with the FAA’s multi-day delays in grounding the aircraft and Muilenburg’s regular visits with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago? One can only speculate. But, the whole sequence of events with the seemingly lower priority to 100s of deaths than the company's stock repurchases and dividend payments in the same period just reinforces the evidence of public-private collaboration in a leadership failure of the highest order.
31
@Max from Mass
Muilenberg's "seeming absence" from the process? With his $23.4 million 2018 compensation, (a "well-deserved" 27% increase from the previous year), he was probably out shopping for another yacht or another vacation home.
20
"[Muilenburg] reportedly made a personal call to President Donald Trump [two days after the Ethiopian crash] to vouch for the safety of the 737 Max 8 jets, two-thirds of which have been grounded globally after two fatal crashes of the aircraft in five months."
https://www.newsweek.com/boeing-aviation-ethiopian-airlines-faa-muilenburg-1361015
16
If the MAX had been shipped originally with the software changes now being contemplated and likely to be proposed by Boeing, OR if pilots known about MCAS' existence and had specific training to deal with it, OR if the disagree light had been operative on every MAX and pilots had known what it meant what do if it lit - OR, EVEN MORE, if all 3 of these things had been done, neither of the 2 planes would have crashed and we wouldn't be having this discussion. THEREFORE ... the basic design of the MAX is safe - it just needs those corrections and a modest amount of pilot training. And the idea that the basic design is unsafe is, from what we know, without foundation ... That said, I agree that Boeing was both stupid and maybe criminally negligent not to move faster after the first crash, and I kept thinking, why don't they fix whatever went wrong in that crash?
4
>>> "THEREFORE ... the basic design of the MAX is safe . . ."
Well, we can argue about whether the airframe is safe or not, but what is indisputable is that, with the changes resulting from the changes in engine size and placement, the MAX airframe wouldn't meet FAA requirements for longitudinal stability. So, Boeing implemented MCAS as a software fix for a fundamental hardware problem.
It's not uncommon to employ software to deal with hardware issues, these days, but it's probably a good idea to think very carefully about the desirability of doing that when the hardware problem is an unstable airframe.
22
@Douglas
Exactly! It's a structural (no pun intended) not a situational problem.
7
To the best of my understanding, your claim is unwarranted. Every airplane ever built has its own unique handling characteristics that requires experience and sometimes subtle control inputs, either by the pilots or the autopilot system. The problem in the case of the Max 8 was that Boeing was aiming to allow pilots to be certified on the Max based on their certification on previous 737 models. The max is no more unstable than any other aircraft, but it requires specialized training and knowledge to know how to handle potential stall situations, and runaway horizontal stabilizer problems. Boeing intended MCAS to operate surreptitiously, behind the scenes, in an effort to give it the same handling characteristics as earlier 737s. As revealed in a very early New York Times exposé on this topic (after the Lion Air crash, but before the crash in Ethiopia), Boeing was motivated out of economic competition with the Airbus A320neo. If pilots required no retraining to fly the Max, it would be a huge savings, especially for financially stressed discount carriers, thus giving Boeing a major selling point over Airbus. This is why Boeing was so secretive about MCAS. No one, including the pilots, was supposed to even know MCAS was there. And one can imagine that this is why the pilots' union was so immensely pissed off when they discovered what Boeing was up to. I would be interested to know how many other incidents the union was aware of that did not end in a crash.
6
Volkswagen lied, they did put life in danger but not in the same dimensions as a plane crash with ZERO chance to survive.
The chairman was gone, and so were other senior managers. It took time, but it happened.
One plane crashed, 189 people died, and Boeing? (quote "The Boeing executives resisted")
Next plane crashed, 157 people died. and Boeing? (quote "Boeing is facing intense scrutiny")
There is to much coziness in the management structure - and that needs to change.
Bayer Monsanto - 2 billions for two cancer victims.
Quote " Alva Pilliod, left, and Alberta Pilliod, third from left, with their lawyers after a jury ordered Monsanto to pay the Pilliods $2 billion in damages" NYT May 13 2019
casualties from Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines = 189 + 157 billions?
18
@Martin
What VW did was WAY worse. Too much diesel exhaust can kill lots of people, especially in Europe with dense population and many diesel cars in use. Far more loss of life than the worst case scenario with this plane - which is approximately what we got.
I'm an engineer. This sounds like an issue of "can just" thinking. What I mean by that is, when looking at a design weakness, the design thinking strays to "the user *can just* do ... something". It's an easy trap to fall in to, especially under time pressure.
In this case, I am sure the possibility of the sensor failing was considered; engineers are extremely good at finding design flaws. The "can just" trap is right there in the article. "If the sensor fails, the pilots *can just* follow the standard uncontrolled tail movement procedure." The line of thinking fails when you consider that uncontrolled tail movements are probably rare, not something pilots deal with every day. Under stress, the correct procedure might be hard to come by in the cockpit.
46
MCAS moves the tail twice as fast as the normal trim system. A small detail not widely known.
2
What did we do to deserve these assaults on all fronts? Unsafe planes, tainted drugs, slimy financial advisors? The list goes on.
It's time. It's past time. Not sayin - just sayin.
21
Attention Boeing 737 executives: please clean out your desks and report to HR. No stalling this time.
20
Anyone who thinks they're going to avoid computer-controlled Boeings by flying Airbus are absolutely clueless. There have been numerous Airbus crashes over the years attributed to computer malfunctions, some of which were never resolved. Like with the 340, which is flying all over the world.
7
@Mike
you mention the A340 Mike; can you detail any 340 incidents you know of please; and which were "computer malfunctions" please
11
@Fred Jones there have been 13 of them, including a test flight, air France 447 (incredibly similar to these two accidents, which you will predictably blame on pilot error whereas you blame the Boeing crashes on the plane), one in Tripoli, Qantas 71, Qantas 72. It's not a short list.
If the MAX had been shipped originally with the software changes now being contemplated and likely to be proposed by Boeing, OR if pilots known about MCAS' existence and had specific training to deal with it, OR if the disagree light had been operative on every MAX and pilots had known what it meant what do if it lit - OR, EVEN MORE, if all 3 of these things had been done, neither of the 2 planes would have crashed and we wouldn't be having this discussion. THEREFORE ... the basic design of the Max is safe - it just needs those corrections and a modest amount of pilot training. And the idea that the basic design is unsafe is, from what we know, without foundation ... That said, I agree that Boeing was both stupid and maybe criminally negligent not to move faster after the first crash.
2
Unless those who make criminal decisions at corporations are personally held accountable with jail time, not only will nothing improve but, to the contrary, such will encourage others to do likewise, as it effectively says, "Don't worry about doing the crime 'cause you aint gonna do the time."
Boeing is not responsible. Individuals at Boeing who have made certain decisions are responsible and should be treated accordingly. If there are criminal acts, levying a fine against Boeing is absolutely meaningless, just a cost of doing business no different from the cost of the toilet paper in the C.E.O.'s bathroom.
I don't know all the facts regarding this particular case and whether there were criminal actions, but it seems clear that there is sufficient evidence to justify a criminal investigation to see if individual criminal prosecutions are warranted.
Of course none of the tobacco C.E.O.s who lied to Congress nor any of the Wells Fargo people who signed off on setting up phony accounts in many of our names have done time, so why should Boeing's top management expect any different? The function of criminal penalties is not merely to punish wrongdoing but to deter it. Citizens United notwithstanding, corporations don't make decisions, people do.
24
There is no disagreement about Boeing's culpability. Let's remember that no one held a gun on the senior executives at the FAA; the ones who signed off to Boeing's scheme to self certify the aircraft.
How ironic that it's an aviation scandal that began in 1981 with age of Reagan, during which everything about regulation was bad and inefficient. Step 1: fire all the ATC union members who walked out for what they deserve. From there it's a short distance to let Boeing make the call.
12
My guess, that 737 Max isn’t going to be seen in the skies for a good long while and Boeing might very well go bankrupt in the meantime. The FAA and everyone are going to realize that there’s no “software fix” that can adequately ensure the safety of that plane, not until comprehensive testing and retraining of all pilots.
Great example of shortsighted corporate greed over common sense.
14
I have worked in US industry and outside the US.
I have never come up against a work culture like the US where lives mean so little. I have experienced it first hand.
Some US executives treat people / consumers with the respect the gun lobby shows the Parkland students.
55
“One of the questions will be, is our design assumption wrong?” Mr. Sinnett said. “We’re going through that whole thought process of, were our assumptions really even valid when we did this?”
This is Boeing's problem - too many assumptions. They changed the flight dynamics of the 737 by installing the bigger engines to compete with Airbus. The plane is inherently unstable at high angles of attack. I don't care what Boeing does to it. I will never fly in a Max.
I encourage everyone to watch this episode of the Australian 60 minutes that shows what happens when the MCAS system goes haywire. Talk about frightening.
Rogue Boeing 737 Max planes ‘with minds of their own’ | 60 Minutes Australia
28
@baldski Same here, never flying on any MAX, no matter what.
I'll bet it never gets re-certified, if all the ongoing investigations are allowed to proceed unfettered.
6
Chris, you'd lose that bet, I'm afraid. Have you been paying attention to the current administration's approach to industry regulation? (And to regulations in general?) Saying that the foxes are now guarding the hen houses doesn't do enough to paint the picture. It's more like Dany's dragon "guarding" King's Landing.
5
So back then when it was bad, they said everything was fine. But now, everything is fine.
6
Bomben, Sinnett, and Dennis Muilenburg all should be fired, and more if need be. How Boeing thinks it is ok to have these people “on board” after 356 people have already died because of Boeing’s negligence, is unbelievable. Many people get fired for doing way less than being responsible for murder.
22
You are kidding yourself. The Corporation is made up of PEOPLE. There is evidence that the heads of this corporation failed to act. Everyone who needs to fly should boycott Boeing. Then we'll see about the Corporation.
13
It all seems to be reasonably moot now. The 737 Max has a reputation as unsafe - and no amount of reassurance from Boeing is going to change that. And if travelers are wary of flying in the Max, then airlines are going to be wary of buying it.
14
@Melbourne Town
It's not moot.
Mr Sinnett should be charged with negligence and other crimes.
7
The hands of both Boeing and the FAA are soaked in blood.
This was a problem waiting to happen. Worse, it had already happened with Lion Air and was inevitably going to happen again.
This is what happens when pure capitalism and self-regulation mix. Regulators need to regulate.
56
I've been a Boeing fan for decades. I love planes, I love Boeing planes and they have been a mainstay here in Wichita for decades. There is no longer a Boeing plant here but the fuselages for the 737's are still built here. That being said I am so very, very disappointed in their stonewalling and handling of very critical issues. The American public, indeed the global public, need to be able to put their trust in Boeing equipment. I don't think any of their recent actions are helping whatsoever. There is an engineering/marketing/legal team malfunction that may very well end up dooming this company to eventual bankruptcy. 747 manufacturing is kaput and they have a whole bunch of eggs in one basket. Time to NOT circle the wagons and start building trust. Get used to "Mea Culpa".
18
@David
A Mea culpa would not suffice for the obliteration of the men women and children on those two flights and their devastated families.
9
And exactly what was the role of Boeing's Board of Directors while they safety issues were playing out? No mention anywhere of this overpaid, under worked collection of luminaries whose "job" is oversight:
Arthur Collins Jr.
David Calhoun
Ronald Williams
Lawrence Kellner
Mike Zafirovski
Edward Liddy M.B.A.
Edmund Giambastiani Jr.
Susan Schwab Ph.D.
Lynn Good
Robert Bradway
Caroline Kennedy
Nikki Haley
32
@Kent
Yes, Kent, time to name names.
Boeing is not responsible. Individuals at Boeing who have made certain decisions are responsible and should be treated accordingly. If there are criminal acts, levying a fine against Boeing is absolutely meaningless, just a cost of doing business no different from the cost of the toilet paper in the C.E.O.'s bathroom.
Unless those who make criminal decisions at corporations are personally held accountable with jail time, not only will nothing improve but, to the contrary, such will encourage others to do likewise, as it effectively says, "Don't worry about doing the crime 'cause you aint gonna do the time."
I don't know all the facts regarding this particular case and whether there were criminal actions, but it seems clear that there is sufficient evidence to justify a criminal investigation to see if individual criminal prosecutions are warranted.
Of course none of the tobacco C.E.O.s who lied to Congress nor any of the Wells Fargo people who signed off on setting up phony accounts in many of our names have done time, so why should Boeing's top management expect any different? The function of criminal penalties is not merely to punish wrongdoing but to deter it. Citizens United notwithstanding, corporations don't make decisions, people do.
23
Greedy executives almost succeeded in crashing the world economy in 2008 and its run up. They were bailed out and enjoyed big bonuses. Nobody was prosecuted. Now this. I want to know what it takes to send someone to prison.
28
@Chuck Burton
Being poor - that will get you to jail real fast
17
If the ongoing investigations bear out, the two Boeing executives mentioned in the article should be fired for their callous disregard of public safety.
Question: can senior executives be fired today without receiving their golden parachutes when their actions show a lack of regard for public safety? The public needs confidence that economic pressures can be resisted and good decisions made that reflects those concerns, out of an abundance of caution, for executives to take timely, decisive action to avoid future fatal crashes.
When in doubt, ground and find out.
9
I dare to speculate that Mr Sinnett is not a pilot or engineer, only a profit focused bean counter or perhaps a lawyer. Just like the rest of the management tea at Boeing.
6
Mike Sinnet is, indeed, an aerospace engineer. He worked on fighter jets at McDonnell Douglas and was the chief project engineer on the 787 at Boeing.
That makes his statements even more damning, IMHO.
26
The Boeing Corporation is not responsible. Individuals at Boeing who have made certain decisions are responsible and should be treated accordingly. If there are criminal acts, levying a fine against Boeing is absolutely meaningless, just a cost of doing business no different from the cost of the toilet paper in the C.E.O.'s bathroom.
Unless those who make criminal decisions at corporations are personally held accountable with jail time, not only will nothing improve but, to the contrary, such will encourage others to do likewise, as it effectively says, "Don't worry about doing the crime 'cause you aint gonna do the time."
I don't know all the facts regarding this particular case and whether there were criminal actions, but it seems clear that there is sufficient evidence to justify a criminal investigation to see if individual criminal prosecutions are warranted.
Of course none of the tobacco C.E.O.s who lied to Congress nor any of the Wells Fargo people who signed off on setting up phony accounts in many of our names have done time, so why should Boeing's top management expect any different? The function of criminal penalties is not merely to punish wrongdoing but to deter it. Citizens United notwithstanding, corporations don't make decisions, people do.
6
Anytime you use software to overcome aerodynamics its time to retire the airframe. The 737 is a 50 year old airframe and instead of adding bells, whistles and gee whiz automation it should be retired. Start anew.
42
@Steve, Bang on the nose! You nailed the root of the problem: an old airframe coupled to a new more powerful engine, and a smarty pants piece of software supposed to supplement whenever things got dicy up in the air....add to this an extra cost charge to airlines that want it installed and you have two deadly crashes.
I almost forgot: do not mention anything to pilots,just insert the info in their 4000 page how to fly safely manual. Like this they still have 1 chance in 4000 to sort things out within the 3 to 5 minutes left to find the info before crashing.
Boeing was riding high in April, got shot down in May.
Several engineers have argued that the new engines of the Max 8 were too powerful for the aerodynamics of an old frame. Too many lives lost for a few dollars more....
9
@Marcelo Brito
The original manual did not contain the corrective procedure - the steps to get manual control. It was not inserted. Making the manual easier to read - shortening it - was more important than completeness.
3
Muilenberg needs to go. The longer he remains, the more it is apparent that the board needs to go with him. The restoration of Boeing’s credibility begins there and, in my opinion, is impossible without it. I will not book a flight on another Boeing aircraft until then.
16
What kind of company and people know there's a strong possibility that a product defect could kill hundreds of people, yet resist taking action against it because that probability is not yet a certainty? Though many more important things must happen to educate the public about Boeing's abominable decision-making, I really hope and expect that someone will make a movie about this whole chain of events - something like The Insider, in which Russell Crowe helped expose the evils of cigarette makers. Such a dramatization may be necessary to fully do justice to the deadly injustice perpetrated by these craven Boeing executives.
23
@Thunder Road - many companies. Remember asbestos? The first wrongful death lawsuits were in the late 1920s. Yes, that's right - it was not in the 1970s or 1980s. Many years later, discovery came out that the companies knew exposure was deadly but simply valued profit over employee's lives.
13
@Thunder Road
Boeing is not responsible. Individuals at Boeing who have made certain decisions are responsible and should be treated accordingly. If there are criminal acts, levying a fine against Boeing is absolutely meaningless, just a cost of doing business no different from the cost of the toilet paper in the C.E.O.'s bathroom.
Unless those who make criminal decisions at corporations are personally held accountable with jail time, not only will nothing improve but, to the contrary, such will encourage others to do likewise, as it effectively says, "Don't worry about doing the crime 'cause you aint gonna do the time."
I don't know all the facts regarding this particular case and whether there were criminal actions, but it seems clear that there is sufficient evidence to justify a criminal investigation to see if individual criminal prosecutions are warranted.
Of course none of the tobacco C.E.O.s who lied to Congress nor any of the Wells Fargo people who signed off on setting up phony accounts in many of our names have done time, so why should Boeing's top management expect any different? The function of criminal penalties is not merely to punish wrongdoing but to deter it. Citizens United notwithstanding, corporations don't make decisions, people do.
1
@Thunder Road --Monsanto with Roundup, Exxon, really all the oil profiting companies, whoever made The Pinto (car), all the producers of cigarettes, to this day they are pushing their products, the Sacklers and opioids... to name just some obvious biggies..The real question is, is capitalism compatible with responsible governance of human societies on earth, or do we need to go to some other model,,
7
So much corruption. Are we winning yet?
15
This is how to lose to Airbus.
7
@Sherry That mentality is exactly what got Boeing into trouble in the first place. Apparently nobody is accountable today.
2
I am pleased that the Southwest Pilots Association (SWAPA) and the American Airlines pilots union, Allied Pilots Association (APA) had the integrity to stand up to Boeing. I am unaware of any efforts by ALPA, of which I am a former member. The public should realize that, especially in aviation, unions put safety first.
The pilots and mechanics lives and certificates are always at stake. When something goes wrong, they are the first to be blamed. Unfortunately, this is not always the case with management, which often puts profits first.
Boeing should have started over with a clean sheet design.
The FAA is sclerotic at best.
Continental Airlines, Retired. 7,000 hours in the 737-300 and -500.
32
We now know that Boeing executives made bad safety decisions, poorly executed the upgrades to the software and training, and mishandled the responses to the first AND second 737 Max crashes.
Please tell me why are top executives such as Mr. Sinnett still in charge at Boeing?
27
Because they are waiting for that golden parachute. The one that doesn't crash.
16
It won’t bring anyone back, but I hope these families that lost loved ones sue Boeing and win.
14
"Who woulda thunk it?"
If the pilots concerns were properly voiced and Boeing resisted any investigation into these problems I think that's called homicidal negligence.
34
Profit over safety and human lives. What kind of men are these?
23
Shouldn't this article at least make reference to the FIRST reporting on this recording only yesterday at the Dallas Morning News??
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2019/05/13/newly-surfaced-recording-details-pilots-pressed-boeing-after-lion-air-crash-requested-faa-records
10
It is instructive that China was the first nation to call Boeing's bluff on this. If China had not acted - and forced the issue - would Europe or the US have done anything other than form a committee to study the issue at the FAA and at Boeing? I sincerely doubt it. Maybe the answer is market forces - maybe the answer is Airbus A320 NEO or the Comac C919. Maybe Boeing will understand loss of sales outside the US for poor management and poor engineering. It appears that market share loss will be the only thing that will stop Boeing's "crocodile tears" over this disaster.
15
No worries. Boeing will get a pass. How so? Whatever Boeing pays in compensation to victims and their lawyers the DOD will make-up the costs in future grossly over-priced airplanes that recover much more than the 'cost of doing business'. Now, with an ex-officio executive from Boeing running the DOD, is there any doubt that BOEING will be designated Too Big To Fail?
19
@Bob Aceti
You have hit the nail on the head. Instead of getting barred from future Department of Defense contracts, Boeing will get richly rewarded with new over-priced ones. This should more than take care of any costs related to "that MAX nuisance".
11
It used to be "if it ain't Boeing I ain't going" well, if it is Boeing, I am thinking twice about buying my ticket.
9
@KHW Simple fix. If it's Boeing, I'm not going. See. Fixed.
7
Why does this aircraft need the system that caused the crashes? Stick shakers are sufficent on other aircraft. Is this aircraft so unstable that a pilot can not respond to a stick shaker fast enough to prevent a stall.
6
@Rae: I understand that the reason was that the move of the engine placement meant that the handling would change and that normally that would require retraining. Boeing did not want to do that since it would affect sales, so they tried to “fix” it in software.
10
@Rae Stiening
Simple answer. Yes!
Boeing could not install the more efficient, larger diameter high bypass engines necessary to try and compete with the Airbus 320 NEO as there was insufficient clearnce between the engine and the ground.
So, they mounted them further forward and higher, shifting weight forward and the thrust line higher. This results in a more critical weight and balance and quicker rotation about the center of mass when the throttles are advanced or retarded.
Then, to keep the price competitive with Airbus they tried to eliminate the cost of retaining pilots as well as pricing some safety features as optional.
Executives at Boeing should be tried for negligence and corruption. The senior engineers on the 737 MAX should be tried for negligence too.
9
@Rae Stiening Exactly!!!!
All these lives to catch Airbus and save a few mpg.
9
One of Boeing’s major 787 customers will not buy that plane if it’s manufactured in South Carolina. It only buys 787s built in the Seattle area. Why? Better quality from the WA plant. (See NY Times article) Think the 737Max is Boeing’s only major challenge?
22
@Bascom Hill
Boeing's desire to have a factory in a right to work state has come back to bite them. When it comes to aviation, unions are important to protect whistleblowers - and there are many of them in the South Carolina operation.
18
I wonder if any of the leader at Boeing have added up the costs in human lives and costs to Boeing of the lawsuits from passengers and airlines and determined the actual costs of NOT issuing an emergency airworthiness directive. Basically, a whole bunch of execs should be fired and this should become a lesson to future execs of what happens when you cut corners on safety. Actually the costs to Boeing’s reputation is difficult to calculate, but they lost a decade of positive view by hedging on something that could have been remedied quickly if they have moved on it.
12
This and previous articles are a stinging indictment of Boeing’s quality management system. Change management, risk assessment, root cause analysis all rode roughshod over by a management seriously out of touch.
20
Boeing resisted fixing their planes after pilots pointed out the safety hazard? Boeing must be called upon to answer for this extreme offense. I will try my best to never fly on a Boeing aircraft from now on regardless of what Boeing does going forward.
15
As more true information becomes available one certainly needs to ask where was the FAA. And why is it that Boeing continuously shows up to meetings at all levels with its lobbyists.
Ahhh, the lobbyists. A bonafide investigation would include the money trail from Boeing to and through its lobbyists to all US congressional and regulatory agencies. Get right down to the granular level with local politicians who accepted lobbyists money. Corporations are far too powerful in America.
Corporate money handed out by lobbyists is a hidden tax on everything Americans buy, and in this case it killed people.
America generally functions well in a true market economy. Corporate millions being paid out have taken the consumer out of the equation.
Follow the money!
22
This should finally put to rest the question on whether "3rd world" pilots are competent (never mind the fact that many airlines in these countries employ pilots from all over the world). Even US pilots were alarmed about the Max. It's just bad luck for the pilots who first encountered runaway MCAS.
13
@Bala
Incompetent pilots and faulty equipment are not mutually exclusive.
Greed rules the day at Boeing.... it makes me sick. Good people will lose their jobs because or boardroom greed
14
@Franco 300+ people have already lost their lives because of this.
11
The entire nation is run on corporate greed and boardroom excess. Pilots, workers, and customers are easily replaceable, expendable. That's the nature of unregulated Capitalism, and what we've decided is our highest ideal and priority.
10
if the executives and managers finally go to jail, then this story would be an epic legal/aviation world movie
10
@Theresia It will never happen, sadly.
1
Criminal charges are rarely brought in these situations. Typically it's a slap on the wrist fine. However foreign countries need to look at bringing their own criminal charges if the department of Justice passes on pressing charges.
8
Engineered at Yale and Harvard Business School and a protege of Jack Welch. McNerney brought the GE culture to Boeing. If there ever was a case for punitive damages this is it and this made me sell my stock. I could not stomach being part of what this organization has become.
19
Jail these criminals! What else could work on these ethically devoid executives?!
12
If these planes had been designed overseas but American passengers killed in the US there would be a tremendous uproar and demands that the foreign executives face trial in a US court. Perhaps these executives need to face trial in Indonesia and Ethiopia, and answer to the families of their victims.
47
This seems to be another sad example of rot at the top bringing a great company down.
23
I wonder if the Boeing VPs let their families fly the Max after the first crash.
17
All plausibly deniable until a pilot union member records the conversation. Now, it sounds a lot more like criminal negligence on Boeing's part. They have lost my trust forever. And that's saying something, because I earn my living flying their airplanes.
This isn't going to end well for Boeing.
55
@Dan
Not in a fair and just world anyways.
7
Don't worry, market forces will magically protect us!
Unfortunately the market may allow for a third crash before Boeing thinks the cost of a true fix is justified.
13
I've asked around: "Would you accept a trip schedule that used a 737 Max?"
I can find nobody answering "Yes." Most were incredulous that I even suggested they'd do so.
16
just TRY finding a cross country flight that didn't use the 737 Max in 2018. last August, I flew from San Francisco to Houston, then on to San Jose, Costa Rica. I checked more than a dozen airlines for pricing and every single one employed the 737 Max. Most cross country flights are not don't stop, and those that aren't often employ the 737 Max (some airlines fly Airbus).
3
My wife and I fly back and forth from the States to South America once or twice a year and WILL not be taking this plane again, I don't care what they do or say. I do not trust Boeing anymore and especially do not trust the 737 MAX, this company will be lucky to not go bankrupt. Profits over safety and a callous disregard for human life is not an attribute we want to see in an airplane manufacturer.
22
I'm sure the engineers wanted to design the best airplane possible and advocated for the safest design, but management and executives contradicted their recommendations and forced them to put a compromised product out there. Sadly I'm sure the engineers are blaming themselves and the managers are oblivious to their responsibility in all this.
18
@Stephen oh come on..Engineers were asked how to value engineer the design, i.e., make it cheaper, and THEY came up with the parameters of what could be cut, left untold, etc..Engineers are no more saints than the rest of us..We need government regulations and regulatory departments with NO ties to industry and that are paid enough to keep them as regulators..You don't know any engineers if you think they wouldn't compromise a design..They do it all the time, every day, for money or for nothing..
9
@grace thorsen
Yes, you just described the nature of both obtaining and holding onto a job in these modern day times.
11
@Stephen
If Im not mistaken, the 737 was a revised version of an earlier model, built to carry more passengers. Cut costs and get the plane into production quicker. Probably sounded like a good idea ...
3
What role did Acting Secretary of Defense Shanahan play either in the sordid take of corporate greed at Boeing described here or in creating and nurturing the corporate culture that led to such decision making? And where were Americans pilots in challenging American to act if Boeing would not, and going public if American similarly put profits before human lives?
18
Arrogance kills. This sounds eerily like Dick Cheney insisting that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.
How many killed and injured for nothing because of that arrogance?
This is criminal negligence. People like Sinnett are dangerous.
36
@Gerry no, nothing like that at all. Cheney knew there were no WMD's and just wanted oil profits from regional domination..This Boeing thing is more a private branding protection..It is just not a good comparison..It is more like Bayer insisting that Monsanto's roundup is safe..In fact, it is exactlyl like Monsanto insisting that roundup is safe for the world.. And the weird thing is, this Boeing thing, at least the US delay in grounding the planes, can be tied directly to Trump and Trump capitalists. One expects evil to cloak itself...But it does seem so often it is right there, before one, proclaiming itself as a proponent of the dark side..Hard for me, a student of sociology, Tom Morrione at Colby College in the seventies, to reconcile this with our need to see truth as relative, such an influential paradigm of the era..
14
The spur to build this Frankenplane was American's then-CEO, Gerard Arpey.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/business/boeing-737-max-crash.html
He's the client, so they'll listen to him. But the grunts who fly the thing? Sorry, Boeing can't be bothered.
14
Boeing is not responsible. Individuals at Boeing who have made certain decisions are responsible and should be treated accordingly. If there are criminal acts, levying a fine against Boeing is absolutely meaningless, just a cost of doing business no different from the cost of the toilet paper in the C.E.O.'s bathroom.
Unless those who make criminal decisions at corporations are personally held accountable with jail time, not only will nothing improve but, to the contrary, such will encourage others to do likewise, as it effectively says, "Don't worry about doing the crime 'cause you aint gonna do the time."
I don't know all the facts regarding this particular case and whether there were criminal actions, but it seems clear that there is sufficient evidence to justify a criminal investigation to see if individual criminal prosecutions are warranted.
Of course none of the tobacco C.E.O.s who lied to Congress nor any of the Wells Fargo people who signed off on setting up phony accounts in many of our names have done time, so why should Boeing's top management expect any different? The function of criminal penalties is not merely to punish wrongdoing but to deter it. Citizens United notwithstanding, corporations don't make decisions, people do.
41
@Steve Fankuchen
Here, here!
I'd love to see the NYT address this in an op-ed on this subject in excruciating detail. Bonus points if you write it. The legislation around corporate entities which shields individual from consequences must be change and it starts with speaking the truth.
14
@Steve Fankuchen
Agreed!
2
This gets to the root of the problem. The bottom line issue: Is Boeing corporate leadership guilty of criminal negligence? By all means fix the problem but if there has been criminal behavior then 5hose perpetrating it must be held accountable.
7
Profits before lives.
10
“The worst thing that can ever happen is a tragedy like this, and the even worse thing would be another one.”
Mr. Sinnett's wishes have been answered. Now what Mr. Sinnette?
20
Some people at Boeing should face criminal indictments.
23
Another instance of corporate profits taking precedence over human lives. Greed kills.
19
all the Max's belong in the scrap Heap. and also lock Em up
8
Most giant corporations are like huge, spoiled, over-privileged, entitled, narcissistic bullies. Above all, they're greedy. Profits are their only measure. They ruthlessly push people, governments, other corporations, and the planet to get every dollar they can suck out of the world. They think they're the center of the universe and others exist to serve them. They lie and plunder and pollute and destroy in pursuit of profits and power. They care nothing about ordinary people. They deny that their profits are due to the work of ordinary people -- employees, customers, shareholders, or the taxpayers forced to subsidize them. To them, the deaths of ordinary people mean nothing at all -- except as expense items, costs of settling lawsuits built into their massive budget. As part of the military industrial complex, Boeing is one of the soulless, malignant corporate behemoths that snuffs out lives while sucking the life out of our world.
21
Don’t know if I’d include Boeing shareholders in your list of aggrieved bystanders...
2
@Cece
Thank you and I actually agree. I had second thoughts about including shareholders there but couldn't edit my comment after submitting it.
"Absolutely," said Mr. Sinnet, who it turns out, was absolutely wrong about the situation being under control.
15
Boeing executives' stubborn determination to ignore pilots' recommendations to ground the 737-300 fleet until the faulty anti-stall system could be fixed is sadly reminiscent of NASA executives' overriding Thiokol engineers, who recommended against a launch of the Challenger shuttle in cold weather. In both cases, executives sought to push ahead despite the warnings of subject matter experts who knew far more than they did. It is unfortunate that executive authority leads to arrogance and arrogance leads to the loss of innocent lives. When will American executives learn that "confidence" cannot overcome the laws of the physical universe?
39
@OldProf
It’s the arrogance that allows these individuals to rise up in the organization, and it’s a rare person who can rein in their own character.
15
Absent effective regulation, we're all at the mercy of the Mr. Sinnetts of the world - corporate yes-men whose only concern is the next quarterly report. With the feckless Elaine Chao running the Transportation Department, we are, for all intents and purposes, left to our own devices. Flyers need to let American Airlines and Southwest know what they think of the 737 Max.
31
I hope that all the conservatives who think that corporations can 'regulate themselves' or that government regulations are 'unnecessary' are forced to fly MAXs without any improvements on them. This is what you get when you try to cut corners and trust companies who have a profit motive to cut corners to do the right thing. Of course they will not. They will only do what they have to do as this and countless similar issues have shown us over and over again.
51
They don’t care.
10
@Chris Jones
They should also be made to drink the water that poor people in Detroit drank and breathe the air in south L.A.
and enjoy the great medical care available in Texas ...
7
@Chris Jones
Put ALEC the Heritage Foundation the Club For Growth and lawmakers from Alabama on the plane. And for good measure can they fly through turbulence made worse by climate change?
4
Additional factors, rarely mentioned, are the crowded, noisy, distracting offices in which many Boeing engineers and software developers work. In such workplaces, the risk of making careless mistakes or overlooking critical details increases. While of course, when working on something as complex as a commercial airplane, collaboration is very important, so is the ability to concentrate.
7
Unfortunately, because Boeing was forced to ground the planes, the full scope of the problem is being suppressed Without more data on the day to day operation of the plane, yes, including malfunctiong pitot tubes so that a correct fix may be unknowable. Clearly, the major malfunctions were with discount foreign airlines, what can't be known is how domestic airlines would be handling it.
3
Bad call Boeing. In the South, when you make a stupid mistake while trying to save money, we call it "throwing dollars at dimes."
As for the loss of life, I hope you lose billions.
11
billions won't even be a dent and that pitiful organization
3
“The assumption is that the flight crews have been trained,” Mr. Sinnett said in the meeting.
That's interesting, because a design priority -- and selling point -- of the MAX was that the thing flies just like a NG and pilots only needed minimal training, none of which included the different pitch characteristics, MCAS, or the reliance on a single sensor for AOA data. Surely Mr Sinnett was aware of that.
26
@TDK
Surely you are aware that the training he was talking about was the runaway pitch trim procedure, which is the same on NG and Max.
1
Not entirely true, the undisclosed MCAS operated even when the autopilot was switched off.
No such issue on NG or earlier 737s. The MCAS continued to override the pitch button on the yoke.
6
@GW
1) MCAS operated ONLY when the autopilot was off. But so what? It's still runaway (i.e., uncommanded) trim, which can happen in an NG with or without the autopilot on. And the procedure is the same. Particularly after the Emergency AD, but also before.
2) MCAS does not override the pitch button on the yoke. The pitch button on the yoke overrides MCAS (which you can see for yourself by examining the graphs of the DFDR data in the Preliminary Reports). And MCAS does not activate right away after the pilot releases the MET switch (which you can also see for yourself by looking at the Preliminary Reports).
The Emergency AD told the Ethiopian Airlines pilots what to do and they didn't do it.
2
Planes don't kill. Executives without oversight do.
62
This is what you get when you allow a company to get too big, too powerful and too arrogant. There will be no true accountability.
16
It is criminal. Pure and simple.
21
Corporations fought to be treated as people when it came to giving money to politicians. Fine, so now charge them with murder for the deaths on the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes.
127
@Craig
Excellent point.
15
@Craig
Bravo! Maybe this is how we fight back.
6
@Craig And just how do you mete out the punishment to a corporation?
The 737 MAX is a flawed airframe design that Boeing tried to 'fix' with a software system unknown to even pilots. This is the epitome of hubris and I seriously doubt the flying public will ever trust this plane. No amount of software updates, or re-branding, will change this. Boeing should scrap the plane and start from scratch (which is what Boeing should have done in the first place...)
37
It seems that Boeing executives knew there was a major design flaw in the Max8 and purposely kept their own pilots out of major meetings to discuss the issue.
The three individuals who met with the AA Pilots should be fired along with the CEO.
Profit over Safety what a serious error in judgement.
And Lastly destroy almost 100 years of Corporate goodwill.
“If I’m going it’s Boeing”
16
if I'm going it's Airbus
7
Years ago, Ford decided to keep selling the Ford Pinto, which had a gas tank behind the rear axle, and which had a tendency to erupt in fire when rear-ended. Ford ended up paying millions after losing suits by victims of those fires (and the victims' survivors) for that dumb decision.
Boeing is going to end up paying BILLIONS for this idiotic string of decisions: building a plane that is fundamentally flawed, providing an ineffective "fix", and deciding not to do a proper review which might have grounded the planes before the second disaster.
That does not include the incalculable cost to Boeing's reputation, and the loss of a large number of sales, which one would expect will follow.
The management of Boeing (including everyone who had a finger in this disaster) should get fired, and personally made to disgorge all the "bonuses" and other benefits that the company has given them.
Jail terms would also be appropriate.
104
The gasoline, in a crash, was thrown into the car's cabin and burned people, not always killing them. There was a consideration made at Ford, as to whether it was cheaper to settle lawsuits or to have a recall and fix the defect. I saw a documentary with a young woman who had been horribly burned in one of those minor crashes. there was a weak panel between the tank and the cabin.
4
The Times needs to do a detailed report on what happened to Boeing after it merged with McDonnel Douglas. The traditional Boeing company people think they know no longer exists. And they need that inquiry to run all the way up to our President's current top choice for Secretary of Defense...
16
“Do you feel comfortable that the situation is under control today, before any software fix is implemented?”
Absolutely not. And with the Federal Regulatory Agencies guarded by the foxes in their hen houses, I am NOT bullish. (See "Americans Need Generic Drugs. But Can They Trust Them?" Opinion piece, out today just for timely starters......) Life is apparently....cheap.
14
"Less than four months later, an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed, killing all 157 people on board."
I believe that sentence needs a second half that reads:
"...after which Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg placed a personal call to Donald Trump to ask that the Max 8 not be grounded in the U.S., even though two thirds of the fleet had already been grounded in other nations."
Let's be frank. At every step along the way, Boeing has done the wrong thing in the interest of self-preservation. And from the sound of the company's most recent conversations, nothing has changed.
172
Fly hundreds of Touch and Goes with the 737 Max with multiple aircraft. Prove the new software and training are correct and safe. Boeing first, but the FAA too, are going to eat this one Big Time !!
7
Many comments are about the manufacturer. The US government shares blame. Didn't the FAA commit nonfeasance by allowing the manufacturer to "self-certify? There is no technical justification for allowing a major change without redesign of the aircraft, which made it inherently unstable. It was all to save money. And there is no way to be 100% sure there are no remaining bugs in complex software. It appears reliability of sensors was not given a lot of thought. Accepting this plane in the future will be a faith-based initiative.
12
Sorry Boeing but I, and everyone I speak with about the Max issues, is in agreement that we’ve lost trust and confidence in you to do the right thing.
It seems to be a clear cut case of negligence, pure and simple. How such a critical addition to the flight control system is not even documented in the manuals, no one is trained on the system, and even worse the entire system is dependent on a single point of failure - input from only one sensor, which has been know to have a fairly high failure rate. What kind of engineers do you employ that would design such a fragile system? Not one person I know has any confidence in Boeing to to the right thing. I don’t see how Boeing ever resurrects their reputation after this fiasco.
32
@A. Axelrod I would agree with negligence but would add arrogance (We Are Boeing) and corporate greed to the sins of this company. It will take a very long time until the flying public and more importantly the airlines to be comfortable with them.
10
@A. Axelrod At least negligence -- more likely reckless indifference
6
There was a time when Boeing represented the best of engineering business practices. Then McDonnell Douglas was assimilated, and the corruption was internalized.
21
Boeing's behavior reminds me of the BP oil spill and their executives who tried to put a similar spin on an absolutely profound tragedy the effects of which are still being felt today.
59
I've been flying regularly for 45 years. I have legacy elite status with two different airlines, I sincerely believe the old line about air travel being the safest way to go. But I will never, ever, if I have anything to say about it, ever fly in a Boeing 737 Max.
39
@Andy Same. When the first crash happened, I diligent checked each aircraft I was boarding to ensure it wasn’t the max. And I’m an auditor (for food safety) and after reading Boeing’s justification for not letting pilots know about the existence of the system, am definitely not boarding any new aircraft designed by anyone until the certification and auditing systems are revamped to actually do their jobs, too, of identifying problems like this.
20
While the article reports on the lack of action by Boeing executives Sinnett, Bomben, and Moloney, we should not forget that these men were speaking for Boeing’s top management. These 3 men were not some renegades straying from company policy. Outrage at their disregard for safety should also be directed to the top managers whose orders they were carrying out.
35
I might consider flying on a 737 MAX again if Sinnet and all other top Boeing executives and their families were forced to fly them every week for 6 months in Africa and Southeast Asia. That's the only way I'd know real safety reforms and fixes were put in place.
33
@Al Sun That would be a fair request if you were prepared to volunteer to fly with your family on Airbus or Chinese aircraft every week for 6 months in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Read the maintenance history in the Lion Air Preliminary Report and tell me you would ever in a million years put your family on any airplane that airline operated.
Think about the 350 hour Ethiopian FO. And nobody is talking about it, but it looks to me like the Ethiopian accident airplane was heavy for the density altitude (looks like they were ferrying fuel) and was in trouble before MCAS ever activated (again, look at the data and graphs in the preliminary report). No way I'm getting on one of their planes, regardless of who made it.
2
May Sinnett and all Boeing's top executives be held criminally responsible for the deaths of those people aboard their planes. The complicity of the FAA renders them liable too.
I'm dreaming of course; in cases like this you get the justice you can buy and Boeing will buy a lot.
Like the leaders of our giant financial firms in 2008, the real criminals will walk away. The victims are just collateral damage to ignore for a bad quarter or two.
48
Spare some wrath for Gerard Arpey, the American CEO who Trumped them into building it. And then sent American itself on a controlled flight into terrain. What we know as American today is really America West writ large.
4
"The Boeing executives, Mr. Sinnett and Mr. Bomben, explained that the company did not believe that pilots needed to know about the software, because they were already trained to deal with scenarios like the one on the doomed Lion Air flight. All pilots are expected to know how to take control of an aircraft when the plane’s tail begins moving in an uncontrolled way because of a malfunction, nudging the aircraft toward the ground."
The core of this is who controls the aircraft; the Pilots or Boeing's Computer?
Most in the general public do not realize that modern, fly-by-wire, commercial transports, Airbus included, place a computer between the pilot and the control surfaces. If the computer starts acting up - tough luck. There is no other way to move the control surfaces.
The pilot points the plane and the computer moves the ailerons, rudder, all flying tail and throttles. The GPS needs a standard rate turn to roll out on heading 255 and tells the computer to do it.
Once pilots are reduced to uniformed figure heads, you do not have to pay them as much or spend much on their training.
7
A recent satire in The Onion put it perfectly: "Did Boeing overlook safety risks? Yes, but you have to understand, it was for money."
235
@FilmMD The United States in a nutshell!
12
@FilmMD Why do you call it satire?
6
@Ernesto Very good point
4
So who is going to be the first to fly the patched 737 Max? Will air travelers trust assurances from Boeing and the FAA given everything we have learned about their modus in the last few months?
8
Welcome to aviation. This garbage is part of the game. From my experience, management always wins until public perception and out-cry overwhelmingly forces the management to give up. It’s a tug of war between pilots, maintenance and money. Money wins. As usual.
26
Criminal,sad...
11
No one in their right mind would ever risk taking a flight in a Boeing 737 Max. Sorry, Boeing. You made a big mistake with this one. Go back to the drawing board, gentlemen, because this plane is finished.
93
@Mike I will certainly not fly a 737 Max for a year at least, but I bet you they lower prices on routes served by the max and there will be more than enough fools willing to take a chance.
6
@Mike
This egregiously designed and poorly tested plane is indeed "finished", and because so much hinged on its sales success, that probably finishes Boeing's civilian plane business,another old success story ending in utter failure to maintain credibility and any humane interest in public responsibility.
Lock 'em up.
2
This is a good time to take a look at our individual carbon footprints. Because this is a big country and because, thanks to the Koch Bros. we have rotten rails and worse trains, many of us are forced to fly against ourwills. Throw this irresponsible Boeing company with blood on its hands into the mix and the writing on the wall says "if you don't like it, change." I personally have decided not to fly any more except in cases of utter and pressing necessity. Telephones, Skype, email, local driving can do the traveling for me. Boeing makes saying "NO" easy.
9
@dressmaker Yes! Highspeed rail, please, center city - to - center city, stops along the way as appropriate. If nothing else, that will slow hypercontentration of population & investment in central cities & give a boost to the lagging economics of the communities in-between.
8
@nicolo
You see the light. Take a page from Europe's book where train travel is fast, dependable, inexpensive and pleasant. Train envy!
6
Another American icon imperiled by American capitalism's laser-beam focus on short-term shareholder value. It doesn't have to be this way; the Germans have maintained their stellar manufacturing reputation along with their prosperity, and if Boeing is a shining example of the future of American capitalism, their long-term future looks far brighter than ours.
17
@Alexander well, the Volkswagen emissions cheating suggests German manufacturers are not always averse to putting short term profit ahead of long term reputation.
7
Volkswagen? strong oversight is needed to keep greedy people from behaving unethically.
5
@Alexander
um...Volkswagen?
2
Isn't it time for a "regime change" at Boeing?
29
The 737Max8 is an unstable airframe, because it's a 1968 design, made "close to the ground" so the original rear descending staircase could be used (this was before all airports had "jetways"). When Boeing refused to update the airframe, and modified the plane, converting to more fuel-efficient, but heavier engines, they still had to account for the close ground proximity, resulting in the inherent instability we now see: the plane does "wheelies" on takeoff, which is WHY the MCAS "system" was installed.
After the Lion Air crash, Boeing had a software "fix" in JANUARY, ready for FDA review, certification and implementation. But guess what? The "president" called a SHUTDOWN, so no requisite FDA personnel were on the job.
The Ethiopian crash should never have happened!
Please see this history of the root cause:
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-fi-boeing-max-design-20190315-story.html
65
@Slann Thanks for the link to this very informative article.
1
This is the future; mega corporations that just factor in pay outs for wrongfully death as “the cost of doing business” what was paramount in Boeing’s mind was rushing to market to compete against Airbus’ advantage.
“Sell! Sell! Sell! We can iron out the kinks later” so what if a few hundred people die during our experimental phase. It’s built into the spread sheet calculus.
34
Willful negligence on the part of Boeing.
This V.P. needs firing, really fast.
18
@Matthew O'Brien I wonder how he feels knowing he is directly responsible for the deaths of all those Ethiopian Air passengers... and he or whoever made the decision not to ground these aircraft and/or rush out a fix should go to jail. They won't because corporations are never held accountable but in a just world they would be in prison.
5
Shame on Boeing and the FAA
12
"Michael Michaelis, an American pilot, argued that Boeing should push the F.A.A. to issue what is known as an emergency airworthiness directive."
This seems backward to me. Shouldn't the F.A.A. (the regulator) be pushing Boeing (the regulatee), not the other way around?
19
@tjsiii
It's backward in the rest of the world, but not in this country where industry often captures the regulator. Remember, Boeing was allowed to "self-certify."
16
If you want to save American aerospace in general, and keep Boeing as a top player instead of "one of the rest", to the AIrbus colossus, then the only solution is to get savage with Boeing and the FAA. That means the everyone who rubber stamped the flawed design leaving the company in handcuffs, and giving safety inspectors at Boeing the power to get their managers fired if their concerns are not addressed.
82
No Mr. Sinnett--the question is not whether it was clear that the system was the cause of the Lion Air crash, the question is whether it was clear that it was NOT the cause.
Unless that was clear, the plane should have never left the ground.
This is looking more and more like criminal liability. That, I suspect, is why this has been quiet in the press for the last couple months. Expect "heavy" fine (probably a slap on the wrist) and, if there's any justice, jail time.
Criminally negligent homicide is a serious crime. 150 counts is pretty heavy (once might be chalked up to negligence, after that, it's a lot closer to intent). They'd better hope they don't get turned over to Ethiopian authorities.
What was their lobbyist doing at this meeting anyway? Did he have something to say about airworthyness?
172
@Justin Not just negligence, in my opinion, but reckless disregard for the value of human life
17
@Tim, you did not explain that reckless disregard for human life, or “depraved heart,” is second degree murder in most U.S. jurisdictions.
13
@A Good Lawyer That is what I’m getting at
5
Boeing management should be ashamed of their negligence. How could they not describe a critical system in the flight manual? Management and engineering malpractice at it's worst.
19
Somewhere a worried Boeing exec is shouting into his phone: “Quick, hire more lobbyists and send them to DC! Tell em to kiss Trump’s sweet behind if that’s what it’ll take!” I have already adjusted travel plans three times to avoid these aircraft. No way would I put my family on one to save a few bucks.
57
The Boeing executives and FDA officials who approved the 737 Max should be imprisoned for life. They killed hundreds of innocent people in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
39
@Hopeless American
How about in an Ethiopian or Indonesian prison?
As if it couldn't get any worse with Boeing turning a blind eye to flaws in the design, now it comes out that even after a crash killing everyone on board they were still in denial. Unbelievable. Outrageous. Criminal. If a normal person caused that many deaths through criminal negligence they would be in prison. If corporations are people too, and if they have all the rights that people do, then those who knew and were responsible should be in prison too. But chances are, Boeing the corporation will get a slap on the wrist, a digestible fine, and go on cutting safety corners cause it's good for the bottom line.
87
@Sherry An unmentioned irony is that the extensive TSA inspections passengers now endure to board airplanes is to protect these privately owned vehicles from repeated misuse by (originally Saudi) passengers. Do you see any such protection for passengers of publicly owned trains, subways, buses, ferries, etc.? I don't, and Boeing apparently doesn't prioritize protecting its pilots or passengers, either.
This, imho, is why legislators must be accountable to the public, not their big campaign funders. Alternative legislation is at www.thefairelectionsfund.com.
3
@Sherry
I believe they still are in denial.
Pilots know what is safe better than anyone else. The Max should be parked in a field and scrapped. I used to believe I was safest on a Boeing. And government oversight is so dismal in this arena I can’t tell the difference between the FAA and Boeing anymore
38
If Boeing were an individual responsible for the deaths of the passengers, that person would be tried as a criminal and then spend many years in prison. The equivalent for a corporation is that Boeing should be sued into insolvency, bankruptcy, and non-existence.
26
Put the management who made the decision to keep the planes flying, like Sinnett, in jail and keep the company going. There are tens of thousands of regular people relying on those jobs at Boeing. Punish the execs- this story shows that it’s them, not the front line employees, who are responsible.
24
Isn't it a shame that this once-iconic American company has been outed as indifferent to the safety of its planes?
Of course, a 50-year-old design should probably be retired. But they didn't do that, either.
Good grief.
20
Corporate America seems to have risen so far above the people who use their products, etc. that they really don't think of 127 terrified, dead humans as anything but a statistic. They don't even get far into into the thought to care about the tragedy.
9
Boeing's image was seriously, and perhaps permanently, tarnished when they held off immediately grounding the planes after the 2nd crash. I couldn't believe they were letting them fly with the obvious crash similarities. It will cost them big. And the FAA looked equally bad. But, our nation is losing it's reputation on all fronts these days, so it's par for course.
428
@Character Counts
Boeing is not responsible. Individuals at Boeing who have made certain decisions are responsible and should be treated accordingly. If there are criminal acts, levying a fine against Boeing is absolutely meaningless, just a cost of doing business no different from the cost of the toilet paper in the C.E.O.'s bathroom.
Unless those who make criminal decisions at corporations are personally held accountable with jail time, not only will nothing improve but, to the contrary, such will encourage others to do likewise, as it effectively says, "Don't worry about doing the crime 'cause you aint gonna do the time."
I don't know all the facts regarding this particular case and whether there were criminal actions, but it seems clear that there is sufficient evidence to justify a criminal investigation to see if individual criminal prosecutions are warranted.
Of course none of the tobacco C.E.O.s who lied to Congress nor any of the Wells Fargo people who signed off on setting up phony accounts in many of our names have done time, so why should Boeing's top management expect any different? The function of criminal penalties is not merely to punish wrongdoing but to deter it. Citizens United notwithstanding, corporations don't make decisions, people do.
19
@Steve Fankuchen Thank god for the union!
7
It seems to me that both the airline and the FAA view this disaster through a flawed lens. There is no mention in this article of any consideration by Boeing or the FAA of the people most involved in these crashes - the passengers and the pilots who lost their lives. And the fact that it is more than clear that these crashes, particularly the second one, could perhaps have been avoided if the pilots had been properly trained, advised or even MADE AWARE of the faulty software.
There is a lot of discussion right now about "Capitalism". This is Capitalism run rampant. It might have cost Boeing some money to deal conscientiously with this problem. They chose not to do so, and in fact made no attempt advert these disasters, and even in this meeting continued to try to pass the blame off on the pilots who had no idea what they were dealing with. And as far as I can tell, the FAA was complicit.
Where does this go from here? Boeing seems to want to continue to put the pilots in the position of continuing to fly planes with the flawed software. Even if the pilots are aware of the issues, the plane may fail to respond in a crisis because the software fails. Not to mention that the physical design of the jet is flawed.
Boeing and the FAA should keep the planes on the ground under the airworthiness directive until the software is redesigned and thoroughly tested, and every penny of the cost should come out of Boeing's coffers.
65
@MB
Unfortunately we do have 'capitalism run rampant' as illustrated by the 99% / 1% breakdown. It is called oligarchy. Many Americans equate this with 'freedom' so any attempt to lessen the disparity becomes 'anti freedom' and socialism is equated with communism. This happens to a society which makes true education for all difficult and/or uninteresting, as we've done over the past few decades thru sort sighted tax policy .... The Romans had gladiator contests to quiet the masses, we have TV ... yikes !
It's time to tear up the 737 Max type certificate. The only reason MCAS exists is because Boeing was compensating for lousy airframe design (too large of a change in pitch on thrust), so they could get the certificate. Take MCAS away completely and see if the plane would meet the required handling characteristics on its own merits.
186
@Alexander of course it meets the handling characteristics. The plane flies fine without MCAS, it crashes when MCAS takes over.
4
@Andrew Lee No, it doesn't. For an in-depth review of why it doesn't:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-looks-to-a-software-developer
The key issue is a 1950s requirement that Planes should not exhibit significant pitch changes with changes in engine power. The 737 Max does, and that's the real reason why Boeing needed MCAS.
14
@Andrew Lee The engines are too powerful for this plane, the plane tilts upward under too much thrust necessitating MCAS to bring it down. This plane was designed when less powerful engines were the rule, this design should have been scrapped but they were in a hurry. MCAS was the second problem of two. Third, no one was ever told abut this program hence of course were not told how to disable it and the instrument panel light to alert pilots that it was coming on were an extra cost option. Boeing will be very lucky to not cease to exist after this debacle.
20
So, when will Mr. Sinnett be charged with negligent homicide?
298
@SYJ
Right on! To deliberately sanction -- indeed, encourage -- the continued operation of a demonstrably defective aircraft is criminal.
Indeed, I'm not sure it should be only "negligent." His withholding the information, knowing it by the analysis of an actual fatal event, from those flying the craft was quite deliberate.
19
@SYJ, sadly, never.
4
For anybody who's going,
To be flying on Boeing,
Be aware they don't care,
About you in the air,
But only in profits growing.
118
So 189 people died in the first crash. That wasn't enough for Mr. Sinnett. But add another 157, and now it's serious? Now we know his personal threshhold to listen to pilots.
“You’ve got to understand that our commitment to safety is as great as yours,” Mr. Sinnett said in the meeting. “The worst thing that can ever happen is a tragedy like this, and the even worse thing would be another one.”
Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Sinnett.
The Board of Directors should terminate Mr. Sinnett, now. And let an experienced pilot be at the side of Sinnett's replacement.
136
@ClearThnker
And don't forget; after the 2nd fatal crash, it still took the U.S. another few days to ground this aircraft. I'm not sure how many flights there were during that time, but the entire country, especially Boeing, was spared an even greater tragedy.
I think that Boeing executives ought to take it FROM THE PILOTS whether or not the pilots had or now have sufficient information about this new system:
“My question to you, as Boeing, is why wouldn’t you say this is the smartest thing to do?” Mr. Michaelis [a PILOT] said. “Say we’re going to do everything we can to protect that traveling public in accordance with what our pilots unions are telling us.”
"Mr. Sinnett [a Boeing executive] didn’t budge, saying that it remained unclear that the new software, which automatically pushes the plane’s nose down, was responsible for the Lion Air crash. He added that he felt confident that pilots had adequate training to deal with a problem, especially now that pilots — who were not initially informed about the new system — were aware of it."
8
I wonder if Mr. Sinnet would have flown on that plane after the first crash, and he definitely would not have flown after the second crash even though he wanted us to fly on it.
29
And Mr. Sinnett sleeps well at night and feels fine about his actions? And will retire with a nice pension, etc.?
This is criminal but since Boeing is a big corporation NOTHING WILL HAPPEN. To anyone.
Just move on people, you didn't see anything here, just move on...
33
This is unbelievable. The only decent thing for Boeing to do is to fire Mike Sinnet, Craig Bombey, and John Moloney the lobbyist who were there at the meeting. Why was a lobbyist at the meeting in the first place? it is bizarre that a lobbyist would be brought along for a meeting to discuss safety. It has become obvious that Boeing has lost its moral bearings.
421
@John A: Ummm......can a corporation have moral bearings? I don't think so---but apparently the US Supreme Court thinks they're "people" ---so maybe we can't be too hard on poor Boeing because it's feelings might get hurt.
16
@John A
Firing them is not enough.
10
@John A, they didn't lose their moral bearings;they sold them.
10
I do NOT understand how Boeing was allowed to assist in the “certification” of the death trap plane known as the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft? Perhaps, the Secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao, who is the wife of Mitch McConnell can appear before Congressional committees to explain how this plane killed about 300 people before it was grounded!
145
@Mark
I love your suggestion.
McConnell looks so smug when he is spouting pious statements about why the Republicans can or cannot do something when the actions he is referring to are purely political chicanery. It will be great to see him squirm when Chao is excoriated in public.
But you know what, it will never happen. Democrats lack the killer instinct that is necessary in politics. That is why they have been singing the anthem of bipartisanship while the Republicans have got away with murder, well figuratively.
1
Frankly, I don't view Boeing's response to be all that surprising and, in the context, probably is a reasonable one. The company wanted to take a methodical approach to understanding the issue and then implementing the right fix. I fly a lot for work so I don't say this cavalierly. My real issue is the obvious coziness of the FAA with the industry that they are charged with overseeing. I view this as being the direct result of all of the "regulatory rollback" that most Republicans seem to believe is the panacea for everything that ails this country. Even in the Obama administration, the constant GOP pressure to reduce the size and scope of governmental functions took its toll and created the environment where the fox guards the henhouse. Until we address the root cause of this problem - with a methodical and deliberate approach - we will just be playing whack-a-mole, whether it be with the FAA, the FDA, the EPA, the USDA, etc., etc., etc., all of which occupy an important role in ensuring the safety of the public. Demand that your elected officials come out strongly in support of public safety, that's the only way to salvage any semblance of victory from tragedies such as these.
99
You are absolutely correct! Regulation redux has been toxic for far too long. If the American people really knew just how committed most government regulators were in all the agencies you listed, they would have a different perspective. The personnel that work in these agencies work long hours and take their work with the utmost seriousness. They are doing good things on behalf of the taxpayer, despite what Republicans may say about these civil servants. Their jobs are made much more difficult and demoralizing by the constant drumbeat of cutbacks and pressure to favor business interests much more than the safety and well-being of ordinary Americans.
4
So it's not methodical to ground a plane until you know what's wrong with it?
5
@nictsiz
Excellent point, tho it runs smack up against the republican narrative, especially under Trump, which has sped up the economy by eliminating much regulation. For example; environmental regulation. Neutral scientific experts estimate that easing environmental regulation could cost 10 thousand lives over the next years, not to mention time & money spent on people who don't die but are incapacitated. I agree with you, but it's a tough road. One argument; People will be trained and paid in the new, clean economy. Unfortunately this view requires 'that vision thing' which sees payoff down the road, often not to those presently involved.
1
1. Boeing will never have the reputation for quality again. They first indicated they didn't care by moving to a non-union manufacturing state. But when they ignored serious safety concerns, they made the world realize Airbus and Bombardier were more reliable.
2. Now that Boeing runs the Pentagon, expect more US Air Force jets to fall out of the sky.
3. Sell Boeing stock.
4. Most interesting scandal yet to be investigated: was there racism in how Boeing made essential safety features an extra charge for African and Asian airlines?
Bottomline: America has egg on its face thanks to Boeing.
69
The executives acted despicably. I hope the lawsuits to come drag them through court for years and years. But it still won't bring back those who died because of their negligence and greed.
26
There is no other way to call Boeing's executives decision to keep their planes flying without calling all 737's pilots to a new training or sending a mandatory re-training to the pilots around the world: it is called MURDER. The first plane that came down "could" be called an unfortunate accident, with some elasticity. The second plane, after the claim made by American pilots, is just simply a CRIME. They (the executives who took the fatal decision) and Boeing should pay with jail and money the lives lost in Ethiopia. One hundred and fifty seven families claim for that.
16
Hate to break it to American and Southwest, but I will never fly on the 737 MAX, hence I won't fly American or Southwest as long as they're in the rotation of planes. I am not the only person out there who feels this way. Boeing has proven it does not give a hoot about flyers safety when push comes to shove.
113
@Shari If American and Southwest continue to fly these planes then it is obvious they do not care either.
I will continue to fly carriers like Delta that do not fly these Rube Goldberg designed planes.
Its it amazing that the E.U. grounded these planes first, and that was the only real reason the FAA, American & Southwest finally did the same.
It will be interesting to see what Ryanair does in Europe as they use Boeing 737 planes exclusively.
9
@annoyed
The 737 Max isn't really an issue for Ryanair - as yet as they only have 3 on order. None of the 431 737s they currently fly are Max, only 800s and one 700.
6
@Shari
They’ve been out of the air since they were finally grounded in mid-March.
2
Wow. If there isn't a criminal investigation already underway, there bloody well better be now. And this tape should be Exhibit A.
13
I thought the pilots always had the last word when it came to flying safety. That's how I learned to fly. Too bad money once again trumps lives.
20
It is a telling clue that both crashes of the Max were from lesser developed countries. Perhaps assuming the pilots really know how to take control of an aircraft's computer systems is a faulty assumption. A lot of US airlines have ex military people as pilots. I wonder how many pilots these days know the principles of flight versus video game computer flying.
3
@bluegirlredstate
you are most welcome to your views; but that is a little unfair; if you look at sales of these aircraft, it reflects worldwide growth. Boeing are pleased to sell their planes around the world: the pilots are experienced and trained. It seems that if the angle of attack indicator is damaged; or faulty; that single indicator empowers MCAS to be the strong force.
2
@bluegirlredstate no basis for the comments. Purely assumptions littered in bias lacking facts.
Recent simulator flight tests at Boeing by airline pilots airlines hailing from developed countries tended towards catastrophic. Yet they had the benefit of all the accumulated knowledge after the fact and doubted they would have survived in a real aircraft.
Unless one has experienced the cockpit environment suspended in 4D, high speed, loss of horizon, high G’s, multiple alarms at low altitudes with automation working against ones skills it is not an informed discussion.
Respectfully
2
Cutting two regulations for everyone added, is the solution.
5
Why are these Boeing execs able to get away with these self-made disasters. From what I have read about these outrageous stories, I am convinced that Boeing was absolutely negligent. They should be taken to court and get their due, which means not settling for some inconsequential fines with no admittance of guilt. They all think they are above the law, just like that guy in the WH. The law is being flaunted by all these wealthy folks who can afford lawyers that know how to work the system. This is not the way it's suppose to work. If you want folks in this country to regain confidence in the system, in the values established by the Constitution, make it work the way it was suppose to for everyone.
7
How will we ever trust Boeing again, when they had knowledge of the problem, but valued profits over human life.
28
So with all these preventable deaths, will someone finally go to jail?
No? Not even the CEO is accountable?
Well then, expect more deaths in the future.
For why would Boeing fix there planes when they can get away with it?
49
The government should prosecute Mike Sinnet personally and individually.
When you only hold the company responsible, the people making decisions feel like they have nothing to lose by taking shortcuts.
110
Agreed. I see a heads I win, tails you lose situation at play. The CEO and senior execs get paid huge sums because of the value of their expertise and decision making, yet repercussions of poor decisions involving life and death don’t merit owning the responsibility.
23
@Mark
CAn you imagine if a surgeon performed surgery like these executives did their job? A tape like this would lead to a loss of license in a heartbeat, so to speak.
7
I am not surprised.
Corporate greed runs this country.
My trip on SW was 3 days away when the 2nd plane crashed. I did not wait for Boeing or our Tramped up government leadership to ground the planes. I rebooked immediately on a MAX.
At some point very soon corporations of every kind, all the businesses that feed our materialistic consumerism, and we the people who insist on having way too much will wake up and address the issue. And it will be hard, challenging work for all.
Thanks to these pilots for speaking truth to power.
10
@JDK
"I did not wait for Boeing or our Tramped up government leadership to ground the planes. "
I rebooked immediately on a MAX."
pardon?
4
Well, well. The smoking gun. Boeing out-and-out refused to do what the best pilots were vociferously demanding. That arrogance will hopefully lead to criminal charges and the removal of those responsible for this debacle from ever being in a position to threaten the safety of the flying public again.
262
@Hammerwielder
Or, more likely I'm afraid, being promoted up the company food chain for "taking one for the team."
5
Years ago, I worked on the team at Boeing that helped customers adhere to repair manuals as well as FAA-issued airworthiness directives. Everyone I knew took great pride in this work, as well as being at the front lines of ensuring safety was top priority.
I'm not sure what culture has sprouted up at Boeing since then, but "turn a deaf ear to pilots" is an unconscionable development. How utterly disappointing for a company that used to be a crown jewel of American quality and innovation.
308
@Matt The Daily podcast (of the NY Times) did a fantastic episode on what culture has sprouted up at Boeing since then, I highly recommend a listen! It is the April 23 episode called: 'The Whistle-Blowers At Boeing: Problems at a plane factory in South Carolina led workers to question whether safety was always the company's first priority'
36
@realist I agree. It appears as though the non-union intentionally located South Carolina plant could be the cause of the problems. I no longer have any faith in Boeing.
12
@realist
Al Jazeera did an exposure video of the Carolina factory 5 years ago. It is on YouTube.
What was our media doing since then? Crickets.
16
Such a simple and freeing thing to promptly admit error and move to remediation - yet here we have another giant too big to fail, having failed us.
Why not come clean ?
10
Boeing isn't a natural person with a conscious, reflecting somberly on bad behavior and contemplating making amends. It is an artificial person with a balance sheet, calculating profit and loss. There is no emotional component in the equation.
3
Boeing is an huge contributor to the Republican party. Is this the reason that the United States, specifically Elaine Chao, was the last Government to ground this plane?
200
@Jobim Much as I dislike Trump, the FAA has been a captured agency for many years-- under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
15
@Alexander Agreed but our Department of Transportation was the last, in the world, to ground this aircraft. There is much blame. Certainly enough to go around.
18
Boeing's stock has dropped a little, but I don't understand why it hasn't been plunging. Every revelation makes the story look worse for Boeing.
43
@Lisa W I'd ask the same question of Facebook, honestly.
Capitalism is working out great, ain't it.
11
@Lisa W Only one competitor: AirBus. It has problems too. No matter what Boeing does, we can't wean ourselves from their planes.
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@Lisa W Good question. Unfortunately, lots of analysts and investors have probably concluded that Boeing won't pay a big legal or political price for this. As for whatever fines or lawsuits ensue, Boeing will just get away with writing them off as a cost of doing business.
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The more information that comes out about this, the worse it gets for Boeing. The lawsuits will be epic.
Trump's assault on the regulation of industry should scare everyone. Without government regulation, safety takes a back seat to profiit.
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@apparatchick Indeed, Ethiopian Airlines and the families of the victims should sue Boeing.
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@apparatchick
I've been amazed at the lack of discussion about the deep culpability of Boeing. I almost see this as being a Boeing-is-too-big-to-fail situation, so let's settle fast, move on, and forget it all happened. Let's do everything we can to avoid epic!
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@Andrew
I fully agree with one reservation. The executives who made the decisions should be punished as well as the company.
6
Maybe it was a bad choice of words on the Boeing executive's part, but his saying that "no one has yet to conclude that the SOLE cause of this was the function on the airplane" almost makes it sound like he is acknowledging some culpability.
It is frightening that a company would not willingly do everything they can to ensure the safety of their product, especially when the lives of others are at stake. Has short-term profit become so important, that it rules above all else?
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This will be a business school case study for years to come. It's sad to see another pillar of America's economy so consumed by "shareholder value" that it can no longer think clearly and do what is right for the passengers and operators whose very lives depend on its products. This is also a sad example of what happens when oligopolies dominate so many of our most critical economic sectors. I'm sure Boeing will be fine but I, for one, am happy that just 1 of 22 flight segments I have booked through next spring are on Boeing aircraft.
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Business schools where? In China?
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@Bjh
Try the decision maker on this McNrney.......Harvard business school. He pushed against the aircraft guys who wanted a new plane. The idea of avoiding more training and going cheap was a good business idea but a terrible idea.
4
@as Absolutely right. They made a decision to get something to market as quickly as possible to have something to compete for orders against what would become the A320 neo family, which was able to fit even bigger engines than the max has (safely). I would say now that Boeing will never get another 737 Max order, and they have nothing else in the capacity segment to compete against the A320 neo.
To save Boeing, kill the max, and design a new plane for that seating segment, like they should have done 10 years ago. As an interim measure after the Max's type certificate is torn up, maybe the existing Max's could be refitted with the 737-800 series engines, at Boeing's expense, and with compensation by Boeing to carriers for the increased fuel consumption.
1
Have the Boeing execs (with families) fly the 737 Max to a hearing in D.C. about this. Or maybe they'll decide to leave early and turn it into a family road trip?
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