By David Gelles
Dec. 1, 2021
FLYING BLIND
The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
By Peter Robison
In October, a federal grand jury indicted a former Boeing test pilot named Mark Forkner, accusing him of deceiving the Federal Aviation Administration and scheming to defraud airlines during the development of the 737 Max, two of which crashed within five months of each other, ki----g 346 people.
It might be tempting to view the indictment as a sort of resolution to the 737 Max ordeal. Identifying a chief villain has a way of simplifying complex narratives and here, at last, was someone to blame. But while Forkner does appear to have hoodwinked regulators and misled customers, he was hardly the one most responsible for the two 737 Max crashes, which occurred in 2018 and 2019.
As Peter Robison demonstrates in “Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing,” ultimate blame for the crashes lies with the highly paid executives who waged a decades-long campaign to transform Boeing from a company “once ruled by engineers who thumbed their noses at Wall Street” into “one of the most shareholder-friendly creatures of the market,” a company that “celebrated managers for cost cutting, co-opted regulators with heaps of money and pressured suppliers with Walmart-style tactics.”
Robison, an investigative reporter at Bloomberg, wrote about Boeing only occasionally in the wake of the second crash. That has not left him at any disadvantage. Through archival research, the benefit of the extensive reporting on the crashes and their aftermath, and interviews with many of the key players, Robison has produced an authoritative, gripping and finely detailed narrative that charts the decline of one of the great American companies.
Boeing’s importance to the country’s economic and industrial story is hard to overstate. During World War II, its factories outside Seattle were “making more than a dozen B-17 Flying Fortress bo----s in a single day,” Robison writes. After the war, Boeing turned its attention to the growing commercial aviation market and began producing a string of planes that would revolutionize air travel, including the 707, the 727, the 737 and the 747. Boeing engineers helped NASA land men on the moon, and the company remains a major military contractor and the maker of Air Force One.
Much of Boeing’s success came, of course, from its ability to produce reliable airplanes. But a crucial part of what made the company great during the 20th century was its exceptional corporate culture. Authority inside Boeing rested with aeronautical engineers, not finance executives. If someone working on the design of a new plane spotted an opportunity for an improvement, the change was made, even if it meant costly delays. What mattered most was getting it right, and ensuring that Boeing planes were as safe as they could possibly be.
When Boeing designed the long-haul 777 in the early 1990s, the company, Robison reports, invested in “$100,000 IBM workstations for every engineer who tested software.” Around the same time, Boeing completed construction of “a $70 million training center near Seattle for pilots, mechanics and flight attendants who would use the 777 and other Boeing planes.” Well into the 1990s, that proud engineering culture was alive and well.
Then, right around the turn of the millennium, Boeing lost its way. Robison accurately traces the beginning of Boeing’s downfall to the 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, a rival aircraft manufacturer. At the time, McDonnell Douglas was run by Harry Stonecipher, an unpleasant chief executive who relished cost cutting and had little patience for deliberative engineers. It was an attitude Stonecipher developed during his years at General Electric, where he worked with Jack Welch, the most influential C.E.O. of his generation and the pioneer of a new style of cutthroat capitalism that prioritized shareholder value above all else.
Stonecipher became chief executive of Boeing and promptly turned the company’s attention away from the business of producing exquisitely designed airplanes and toward the matter of generating profits for shareholders. Payrolls were slashed. Union labor was shunned. Technical work was outsourced to cheap contractors. The transformation only accelerated under Boeing’s next C.E.O., Jim McNerney, another G.E. veteran, who was a runner-up to replace Welch at G.E.
Robison’s history is complete, but at times excessive. Minor corporate dramas that took place decades ago get a bit too much attention. After the introduction, it is more than 100 pages before “Flying Blind” turns squarely to the fateful development of the Max. Once that happens, however, the narrative gains speed and hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion.
Robison homes in on crucial moments during the eight years it took to design, certify and produce the 737 Max, revealing how at each turn, a fixation on profits led Boeing employees to make a series of catastrophic choices.
There was the decision to redesign the 737 instead of designing a new jet, obliging the company to update a plane that had been introduced in the 1960s. There was the introduction of a new piece of poorly designed software, MCAS, which ultimately wrested control of the plane away from the pilots. And there were the numerous instances when Boeing employees, including Forkner, played down the importance of MCAS to federal regulators and airlines, leaving pilots unaware of the new software until after the first crash. All the while, as Boeing executives skimped on the design and development of the Max, they shoveled billions of dollars back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends.
There is a grim sense of inevitability as the crashes draw nearer. Among the most ominous warning signs Robison identifies are the Boeing employees who despaired about their own company. Many said they wouldn’t set foot on a Boeing plane. Others disparaged their colleagues, their customers and the regulators. During the design of the Max, one manager told an engineer: “People have to die before Boeing will change things.”
After the first crash, Robison reveals how Boeing executives, including the company’s C.E.O. at the time, Dennis Muilenburg, blamed foreign pilots for the disaster, and how the company’s leaders proved incapable of grasping the magnitude of the crisis on their hands. He also charts how the F.A.A. lost its teeth as an effective regulator, leaving it complacent and unable to recognize that another plane could crash. After the second crash, Robison follows the families of the victims and their wrenching quest to hold Boeing accountable, and details Boeing’s ham-handed response.
There is an understandable temptation to look for silver linings in the wake of tragedy. We can’t help hoping that 346 lives were not lost in vain, that the lessons learned will allow Boeing to avoid making the same sorts of mistakes in the future. When the causes of the crashes are so clear to see, the culture inside Boeing so obviously broken, the regulatory apparatus so glaringly inadequate, how could fundamental changes not be in store?
Robison, however, finds little reason for optimism. While Boeing has now accepted responsibility for one of the crashes as part of a settlement, no one at the company besides Forkner has been charged with a crime. Muilenburg was ousted as C.E.O., but still collected a $60 million golden parachute. After being grounded for more than a year, the 737 Max is back in service. And today, Boeing is led by Dave Calhoun, another Jack Welch protégé who was on the Boeing board for years, and was intimately involved in the company’s botched response to the crashes. Even with hundreds of families in pain, Boeing’s reputation tarnished and the F.A.A.’s credibility in tatters, “the managers,” Robison writes, “men who heaped on the pressure, reaped the rewards and then disappeared when the whole deadly blunder was exposed — never paid any price.”