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xtruss · 2 months

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What Has Happened to Boeing Since the 737 Max Crashes

— By Priyanka Boghani and Kaela Malig | March 13, 2024

A still from "Boeing's Fatal Flaw," a new FRONTLINE Documentary with The New York Times.

Five years ago, 346 people were killed in two crashes involving Boeing 737 Max planes within the span of almost five months: first off the coast of Indonesia in October 2018 and then in Ethiopia in March 2019.

Boeing’s Fatal Flaw, a 2021 FRONTLINE investigation with The New York Times, examined how commercial pressures, flawed design and failed oversight contributed to those devastating tragedies and a catastrophic crisis at one of the world’s most iconic industrial names.

In recent months, Boeing has come under renewed scrutiny after a door-like panel on a Boeing 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines blew off just a few minutes after takeoff in January 2024. An updated version of our documentary examines the impact of this latest crisis.

“This was supposed to be one of the most highly scrutinized planes in the world. And here you are with another incident that was risking passengers’ lives,” the Times’ Sydney Ember says in the updated documentary.

Here we take a brief look at what has happened to Boeing since the deadly 2018 and 2019 crashes and the recent Alaska Airlines incident.

Change in Leadership

Dennis Muilenburg had been CEO of Boeing since 2015. In the aftermath of the crashes, he testified before U.S. Senate and House Committees in October 2019, acknowledging the fatal accidents happened “on my watch” and saying he and the company were accountable. He told the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, “If we knew back then what we know now, we would have grounded [the 737 Max] right after the first accident.”

Two months after the congressional hearings, on Dec. 23, 2019, Muilenburg was fired by Boeing. The company described the move as “necessary to restore confidence” in Boeing “as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders.”

David Calhoun stepped into the role of CEO in January 2020 and continues to fill the position.

A $2.5 Billion DOJ Settlement and Challenges

On Jan. 7, 2021, the Department of Justice announced that Boeing would pay a $2.5 billion settlement, resolving a DOJ charge that the company had conspired to defraud the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aircraft Evaluation Group.

The DOJ’s criminal investigation focused on the actions of two employees who Boeing said in court documents “deceived the FAA AEG” about the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) onboard the 737 Max — a system the DOJ said “may have played a role” in both 737 Max crashes. The DOJ said the employees’ “deception” led to information about MCAS being left out of a key document released by the FAA, as well as airplane manuals and pilot-training materials.

As Boeing’s Fatal Flaw recounts, congressional investigators found internal documents showing that, after Boeing realized the impact MCAS would have on pilot training and FAA certification, some Boeing employees suggested removing all references to MCAS from training manuals.

“Boeing’s employees chose the path of profit over candor by concealing material information from the FAA concerning the operation of its 737 Max airplane and engaging in an effort to cover up their deception,” said David P. Burns, the acting assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s criminal division when the settlement was announced.

The company entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ, in which Boeing agreed to pay a nearly $244 million fine, to set up a $500-million fund for the families of people who died in the two crashes, and to pay $1.77 billion to airlines that had been affected by the 20-month grounding of the 737 Max that began in March 2019.

Boeing also agreed to continue cooperating with the DOJ’s Fraud Section on “any ongoing or future investigations and prosecutions” and is required to report any alleged violation of fraud laws by Boeing employees when dealing with foreign or domestic agencies, regulators or airline customers.

Boeing declined FRONTLINE’s request to be interviewed for the documentary. In a statement, the company said safety is its top priority and it has worked closely with regulators, investigators and stakeholders “to implement changes that ensure accidents like these never happen again.”

Former Boeing Pilot Found Not Guilty for Fraud

In October 2021, a federal grand jury criminally indicted Mark Forkner, Boeing’s Former Chief Technical Pilot for the 737 Max Airplane, on fraud charges. Forkner, who became the first and so far only individual to face criminal charges after the two fatal crashes, was accused of providing “materially false, inaccurate and incomplete information” to FAA regulators about flight-control software involved in the 2018 and 2019 crashes. Forkner was later found not guilty of all charges in federal court.

Forkner declined to be interviewed for the documentary, but his lawyer told the Times that his communications with the FAA were honest and that “he would never jeopardize the safety of other pilots or their passengers.”

Lawsuits by Families of Crash Victims

By November 2019, Boeing was facing more than 150 lawsuits filed by families of people who had died in the two crashes — over 50 of the suits stemming from the Indonesian crash and about 100 from the crash in Ethiopia, according to the Associated Press’ review of federal court records.

In July 2020, Boeing told a U.S. federal court that claims related to 171 of the 189 people killed in the Indonesia crash were either partially or fully settled, although the settlements were not publicly disclosed.

As of June 2023, cases related to 68 passengers from the Ethiopian Airlines crash were pending.

The Grounding and Return of the 737 Max 8 and Max 9

In the days after the second 737 Max crashed in March 2019, regulators around the world — from China to the European Union and several other countries — grounded the plane. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration followed suit on March 13, 2019, after initially saying the planes were safe to fly.

When the FAA retested and approved the 737 Max 8 and Max 9, ending the grounding in November 2020, it required airlines to take the following steps before putting the planes back into service: installing new flight-control-computer and display-system software; incorporating revised flight-crew procedures; rerouting wiring; completing a test of the “angle of attack” sensor system, which had contributed to both the 2018 and 2019 crashes; and performing an operational readiness flight.

The FAA, in conjunction with aviation agencies from Canada, Brazil and the European Union, also concluded that pilots operating the 737 Max would need to complete special training. It is not clear who would pay for this additional training, which reversed one of Boeing’s original sales pitches to airlines for the 737 Max: that the plane would require minimal pilot training.

A December 2020 Senate committee report criticized Boeing and the FAA’s handling of the 737 Max recertification testing, saying that, based on whistleblower information and testimony, it appeared Boeing and FAA officials had “established a pre-determined outcome,” and that Boeing officials “inappropriately coached” test pilots in the MCAS simulator. The report alleged, “It appears, in this instance, FAA and Boeing were attempting to cover up important information that may have contributed to the 737 MAX tragedies.”

The FAA responded at the time, saying: “Working closely with other international regulators, the FAA conducted a thorough and deliberate review of the 737 Max.” The agency added it was “confident” the issues that led to the two crashes had been “addressed through the design changes required and independently approved by the FAA and its partners.”

“We have learned many hard lessons” from the crashes, Boeing said in its own statement at the time. The company said it took the committee’s findings seriously and would continue to review the report in full.

Following the Senate report, families of the 2019 Ethiopian crash victims wrote to the FAA and the U.S. Department of Transportation in a letter dated Dec. 22, 2020, and reviewed by Reuters, asking for the 737 Max approval to be rescinded and for an investigation to “determine whether the MAX recertification process was tainted.”

A Brazilian airline was the first to fly a 737 Max after regulators there followed the FAA in ungrounding the plane. On Dec. 29, 2020 — a week after the families’ letter — the 737 Max flew paying passengers in America for the first time after nearly two years of being grounded. A month later, Europe’s aviation authority also gave the 737 Max clearance to fly.

On Aug. 26, 2021, India lifted its ban on the 737 Max after “closely” monitoring the plane’s performance elsewhere and noting “no untoward reporting.” China, which was the first country to ground Max jets after the deadly crashes, resumed commercial flights with the model in January 2023.

The 737 Max 10

On June 18, 2021, Boeing’s new model 737 Max 10 took to the skies for its first flight. The Max 10 is larger than the Max 8, which was involved in the 2018 and 2019 crashes, and the Max 9. According to Boeing’s technical specs, the Max 10 is 14 feet longer than the Max 8 and can seat a maximum of 230 people, compared to the Max 8’s capacity of 210.

At the time of the test flight, Boeing was already working on additional safety features in the Max 10 requested by European regulators, according to Reuters.

“We’re going to take our time on this certification,” Stan Deal, who became president and CEO of Boeing’s Commercial Airplanes division in October 2019, said at the time of the Max 10’s first flight, according to The Seattle Times. “We’re committed to make further safety enhancements.”’

The FAA cleared the Max 10 to begin test flights, a step towards certification, last November.

Alaska Airlines Plane Incident

On January 5, an Alaska Airlines jet made an emergency landing in Portland, Oregon, after a portion of its fuselage blew out and left a door-sized hole in the side of the aircraft while it was around 16,000 feet in the sky. None of the 171 passengers and six crew members were seriously injured. The FAA temporarily grounded more than 170 Max 9 jets so they could be inspected.

In the aftermath, Boeing CEO David Calhoun has said, “Boeing is accountable for what happened.”

A Feb. 6 preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board said that the bolts meant to secure the door-like panel appeared to be missing before the flight.

Later the same month, the FAA released a long-awaited report that found that Boeing’s safety culture has been “inadequate” and “confusing.” The FAA gave Boeing 90 days to come up with a plan to address quality control issues.

The FAA conducted a six-week audit after the Alaska Airlines incident, and on March 4 said that it found Boeing had allegedly failed to comply with manufacturing quality control requirements.

Boeing now faces legal trouble in relation to the Jan. 5 event, including lawsuits filed by passengers and shareholders.

On Feb. 21, Boeing told employees that Ed Clark, who led the 737 program since 2021, would be replaced. The memo announcing Clark’s departure and other changes said the company was focused “on ensuring that every airplane we deliver meets or exceeds all quality and safety requirements.”

The Justice Department has also begun a criminal investigation into Boeing in the aftermath of the Alaska Airlines incident, as reported first by The Wall Street Journal.

“Cultural change doesn’t happen overnight, especially at big corporations like this,” David Gelles, one of the Times reporters featured in Boeing’s Fatal Flaw, says. “If Boeing wants to get back to that place of grandeur where it was for so long one of the most important American companies, it’s going to take not four years, but it might take 14.”

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bigyack-com · 4 years

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‘I Honestly Don’t Trust Many People at Boeing’: A Broken Culture Exposed

Boeing’s troubles run deep. The 737 Max, its newest and most important jet, has been grounded since March after two deadly crashes killed 346 people. The cascading crisis has disrupted the global aviation industry, cost the company billions of dollars and led to the ouster of its chief executive.Yet the steady drip of bad news and embarrassing revelations — culminating in Thursday’s release of 117 pages of damning internal communications — has revealed something more disturbing than one poorly designed plane. The very culture at Boeing appears to be broken, with some senior employees having little regard for regulators, customers and even co-workers. Perhaps most tellingly, the documents show Boeing employees repeatedly questioning the competence of their own colleagues, and the quality of the company’s engineering. “This is a joke,” a Boeing employee, referring to the 737 Max, said to a colleague in 2016. “This airplane is ridiculous.” Another employee wrote: “I honestly don’t trust many people at Boeing.” Boeing is the largest manufacturing exporter in the United States, and its fate can sway the national economy. It employs more than 130,000 people, in all 50 states, and supports a network of thousands of suppliers. And the dysfunction at the heart of one of America’s most important companies, as illustrated by the new messages, still has the power to shock. “We’ve all seen this movie before, in places like Enron,” Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the pilot who safely landed a plane on the Hudson River in 2009, said in an interview. “It’s not surprising that before a crisis, there are indications of real deep problems that have their roots in leadership.” Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants union, said the messages revealed a “sick” culture at Boeing, noting that “the trust level was already in the toilet.”The internal communications, which were provided to congressional investigators and cover a five-year period before the crashes in late 2018 and early 2019, show Boeing employees cavalierly dismissing the Federal Aviation Administration, which certified the Max as safe to fly. Ahead of a 2016 meeting to discuss training requirements for the plane, a Boeing employee described regulators as “dogs watching TV.” Another time, a Boeing employee wrote: “There is no confidence that the F.A.A. is understanding what they are accepting (or rejecting).”Airlines, which pay about $100 million apiece for the Max, were derided as incompetent, their questions unreasonable. When discussing whether pilots at an Indonesian airline connected to Lion Air, which operated the first Max that crashed, might need simulator training before flying the Max, a Boeing employee said it was “because of their own stupidity” and called the airline “idiots.”“This is confirmation that the problems go beyond Muilenburg,” said Michael Stumo, whose daughter Samya was killed in the second Max crash, referring to Dennis A. Muilenburg, the chief executive who was dismissed last month. “This is deeply flawed, long-term cultural erosion.” On Friday morning, Greg Smith, Boeing’s interim chief executive, wrote an email to employees expressing contrition for the messages and imploring the company to change. “These documents do not represent the best of Boeing,” Mr. Smith said in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times. “The tone and language of the messages are inappropriate, particularly when used in discussion of such important matters, and they do not reflect who we are as a company or the culture we’ve created.”Mr. Smith noted that the messages involved a relatively small number of employees, and said the company had confidence in the Max. The company declined to comment on Friday beyond Mr. Smith’s email.For generations, Boeing represented the pinnacle of American engineering. It helped win World War II, land men on the moon, build Air Force One and make commercial air travel ubiquitous, even glamorous. But the newly released messages portray a company that appears to have lost its way. Once relentlessly focused on safety and engineering, Boeing employees are shown obsessing over the bottom line. Though Boeing is one of the American government’s biggest contractors, the F.A.A. was viewed as a roadblock to commercial goals that would “impede progress” when it tried to “get in the way.”At times, Boeing employees expressed reservations about the safety of their planes.“Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t,” one said to a colleague in 2018, before the first crash. While the most insensitive comments appear to have been made by a few employees, the messages reveal a coordinated effort among Boeing employees to persuade the F.A.A. that the Max did not need simulator training, a significant financial boon for the company. Boeing employees congratulated one another for using “Jedi mind tricks” to convince regulators that minimal training was needed on the Max. In an email from 2016 celebrating the agency’s preliminary decision not to require simulator training on the Max, the plane’s chief technical pilot, Mark Forkner, said the news “culminates more than three years of tireless and collaborative efforts across many business units.” Last year, other damaging internal communications involving Mr. Forkner were released.In an exchange with Mr. Forkner in 2014, an employee who was developing the computer-based training for the Max suggested providing more guidance in the pilot manual for how to handle certain emergencies. (The plane featured a new software system later found to have played a role in both crashes.)Mr. Forkner told the employee that the company couldn’t add that information because it might lead regulators to require more extensive training for pilots. “We need to sell this as a very intuitive basic pilot skill,” Mr. Forkner wrote. “I fear that skill is not very intuitive any more with the younger pilots and those who have become too reliant on automation,” the employee responded. “Probably true, but it’s the box we’re painted into,” Mr. Forkner said, citing the desire to keep training to a minimum. “A bad excuse, but what I’m being pressured into complying with.”After fighting so hard to avoid simulator training, Boeing reversed itself this week and recommended that all pilots have the training before flying the Max. Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that it would cost the company $5 billion, though Boeing said it was too soon to know the true figure.“Had they done the right thing upfront, they might have had slightly higher costs upfront, but they would have saved billions in the long term,” Mr. Sullenberger said. “But that’s hard to do in this world run by Wall Street.”Stan Sorscher, a former Boeing engineer who then worked with a union representing company engineers, said priorities had shifted over the past two decades, with profits mattering more than quality. “Engineers normally just don’t talk that way,” Mr. Sorscher said of the messages. “It’s not the company I knew.”Boeing and the F.A.A. said on Thursday that the new messages, damning as they are, did not reveal any new safety concerns about the Max. Regulators may approve the Max to return to service in the coming months, and the plane could be flying commercially by the summer.Yet Boeing’s problems are hardly over. The messages are likely to further undermine public confidence in the company and the Max. Today, according to Boeing’s own research, 40 percent of travelers are unwilling to fly on the plane. There is no timetable for the return of the Max, costs are mounting, and shares in the company have fallen 22 percent since the second crash, including a 2 percent drop on Friday. After last month’s announcement that Boeing would temporarily shut down production of the Max, suppliers are hurting, too. On Friday, Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the fuselage for the plane, said it would lay off around 2,800 employees. With a new chief executive, David Calhoun, taking over on Monday, Boeing is trying to turn a corner. The company promoted its transparency in releasing the messages and its decision to recommend simulator training as examples of a new culture. On Friday, Boeing said Mr. Calhoun would receive a $7 million bonus if he got the Max safely flying again. (Mr. Muilenburg is leaving with $62.2 million in stock and pension awards.) But in the words of Boeing’s own employees, the culture is entrenched. As recently as mid-2018, colleagues were lamenting the state of their company in pained emails to one another.“I don’t know how to fix these things … it’s systemic,” one employee wrote to another in an email about the 737 Max. “Sometimes you have to let big things fail so that everyone can identify a problem … maybe that’s what needs to happen rather than continuing to scrape by.”Natalie Kitroeff contributed reporting. Read the full article

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seekandfindgod-blog · 5 years

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Boeing’s 737 MAX jet could soon fly again despite damning probes

Boeing’s grounded 737 MAX could be cleared to return to the skies in the U.S. as early as this year, despite a continued cascade of damning revelations about the design and approval of the passenger jet that crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia, killing a total of 346 people.

If the MAX flies again soon, it will be a major test of the international credibility of U.S. aviation regulators, who risk finding themselves out of step with the rest of the world if authorities in Europe and elsewhere continue to prohibit the aircraft from flying in their airspace.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s evaluation process for returning the MAX to service is moving along even as the agency and Boeing continue to face questions about how the plane gained regulatory approval in 2017. Indonesia’s government issued a report Friday faulting oversight by both the company and the agency, a week after congressional investigators released 2016 emails and text messages in which a former Boeing pilot had boasted of playing "jedi-mind" tricks on regulators.

This week represents a crucial test for the future of Boeing, whose CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, will testify before Congress in what promises to be two days of brutal questions about the twin disasters.

Restoring the trust of the flying public may be an even harder task.

“The recertification of the aircraft is one thing, but the recertification of the trust and confidence is another,” said Dennis Tajer, a spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association, which represents pilots at American Airlines. “You can have an airplane out there flying, but unless it has the pilots standing behind it or passengers — it can fly all day long, if it’s not flying with people on it, it’s really not a product.”

Even so, Boeing said last week that it had completed a “dry-run” of a certification test flight for the MAX. The FAA has repeatedly said that the process for returning it to flight will take as long as required, but U.S. airlines that operate the plane are planning for a return to service early next year.

FAA chief Steve Dickson — who days earlier had reprimanded Boeing for failing to show his agency the pilot messages — said last week that the company had hit several milestones, including handing over a key technical document. But he cautioned that testing and the consideration of training requirements would take “several more weeks.”

European regulators, meanwhile, have signaled that they won't necessarily follow the FAA's timeline. Instead they are relying on their own process, which includes testing and oversight independent of the FAA that will determine their timeline for allowing the MAX back in their airspace. Acknowledging this reality, Muilenburg has said a "phased" global return to service is possible.

Jeff Guzzetti, a consultant who previously worked at the FAA, said the combination of the Boeing pilot’s messages and emails, the reports that have been released about the MAX and the congressional hearings “may cause people to choose not to fly on a 737 MAX for a while,” but that is “different than delaying the ungrounding.”

Still, Guzzetti said he expects that Boeing will be “pilloried” at this week’s hearings.

“And they deserve it. Those emails were pretty unprofessional,” Guzzetti said.

In a 2016 email, Boeing 737 chief technical pilot Mark Forkner told someone at the FAA that he was “jedi-mind tricking regulators into accepting the training that I got accepted by the FAA.”

In a separate chain of instant messages with a Boeing coworker, also in 2016, Forkner wrote that an automated flight control feature called MCAS was “running rampant in the sim" activating when it shouldn't. He also said that he had "unknowingly" lied to regulators, though it's unclear about exactly what.

The messages and emails together again focused intense attention from media outlets and regulators on Boeing and the way the plane was certified, and led the two Democratic lawmakers in the House in charge of overseeing aviation — Reps. Peter DeFazio of Oregon and Rick Larsen of Washington — to state in the strongest terms yet that legislation to address the agency's flaws in aircraft certification is coming.

"None of this looks good. None of it looks good for Boeing right now and none of it looks good frankly for the existing process we have that is supposed to have the FAA and the [Original Equipment Manufacturer], in this case Boeing, talking to each other," Larsen said in an interview with POLITICO. "I don't see how the current certification laws stand."

On Friday, after Indonesian accident investigators released a report blaming the crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX on failures at virtually every level — with the FAA, with Boeing, with the plane's pilots, with the airline's maintenance — DeFazio issued a statement saying it's "clear that reforms will be needed to ensure that future safety-critical systems don’t create single points of failure that bring down new commercial aircraft designs."

"I will continue to use every tool at my disposal to get to the bottom of the failures in the system that led to not one, but two tragic crashes," DeFazio said. "And I will be introducing legislation at the appropriate time to ensure that unairworthy commercial airliners no longer slip through our regulatory system."

DeFazio chairs one of the committees that Muilenburg will appear before next week. The Boeing CEO is sure to be grilled about a series of reports from crash investigators and international experts that found problems with Boeing's design assumptions, the FAA's certification process and the company's communication with the FAA throughout.

But Guzzetti, the consultant, argued that the Lion Air report could actually “provide some relief to Boeing,” since it points to maintenance problems and pilot shortcomings in addition to design issues.

“I think it’s going to mitigate some of the blame that Boeing is going to get,” Guzzetti said.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

source https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/28/boeing-737-max-probes-058030

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fullspectrum-cbd-oil · 4 years

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Boeing Pilot Who Exchanged Leaked 737 Max Simulator Messages Changes Jobs-Sources

One of two Boeing Co <BA.N> technical pilots who described flaws in a crucial flight control system in leaked 2016 instant messages has been transferred to a new job at the U.S. planemaker, two people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

Boeing shares tumbled after the conversation between the employee, Patrik Gustavsson, and then-chief technical pilot Mark Forkner became public on Oct. 18.

The comments by Forkner, who has since left Boeing, were among those pinpointed by U.S. lawmakers in hearings in Washington as evidence Boeing knew about problems with flight control software well before two crashes of its 737 MAX aircraft in October 2018 and March 2019 killed 346 people.

Gustavsson was a technical pilot for the 737 program at the time Forkner told him the jetliner’s so-called MCAS stall-prevention system was “running rampant” in a flight simulator. Gustavsson later replied that other pilots had kept them “out of the loop” on changes to MCAS.

Gustavsson has been transferred in the last two weeks to Boeing’s Test & Evaluation group, a source familiar with the matter said. A second source confirmed that he was recently moved to a new job but had no details.

The Test & Evaluation group includes pilots who put the actual 737 MAX aircraft through hundreds of hours of test flights before the jetliner entered service.

If Gustavsson was made a test pilot in the group, he would have likely received a 15%-20% raise, the first source said.

It was unclear why he changed jobs.

A Boeing spokesman declined to comment.

Before the change, Gustavsson was a 737 technical pilot for roughly 5 years, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was named 737 Chief Technical Pilot in 2018, his profile says.

Gustavsson and Forkner were part of a team that worked on the flight manuals airlines have used since the 737 MAX entered service in 2017, and fielded operations and systems questions from dozens of global airlines operating thousands of 737 aircraft globally, former employees told Reuters in late October.

Forkner also worked to identify and fix glitches on the 737 MAX simulator. He left Boeing in 2018 and is now a First Officer at Southwest Airlines <LUV.N>, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Before Boeing, Gustavsson spent 11 years in various roles such as simulator instructor at Ryanair Holdings PLC <RYA.I>, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Separately, Boeing said on Tuesday that Conrad Chun was named vice president of communications for its commercial airplanes division, taking over from Linda Mills, who is leaving the company.

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Sonya Hepinstall)

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