737 Max documents reveal how intensely Boeing focused on cost
The damaging internal documents related to the 737 Max jet that Boeing released Thursday are full of late-night trash talk between two company pilots who mocked federal regulators, airline officials, suppliers, and their own colleagues as idiots, clowns or monkeys.
While some of the more memorable quotes may be dismissed as bravado – nothing more than hard-charging guys who “blew off steam” after work, as the lawyer for the lead pilot put it – other, more sober internal e-mails reveal the pressures the pilots were under from the Max program leadership. They suggest a troubling Boeing culture that prioritized costs over safety.
All the messages from the leaders of the Max program “are about meeting schedule, not delivering quality,” one employee laments in a 2018 email.
Boeing has disowned the language in the communications and offered an abject public apology. On Friday, interim CEO Greg Smith sent an internal email to employees declaring that the messages “do not reflect who we are as a company or the culture we’ve created.”
The evidence in the documents, however, points beyond a couple of rogue employees to serious problems with how the Max was developed and certified.
The details drew widespread outrage Friday.
Michael Stumo, the father of 24-year-old Samya Stumo of Massachusetts, who died in the Ethiopian crash, said, “These revelations sicken me.”
“The culture of Boeing has eroded horribly,” he added. “My daughter is dead as a result.”
Chris Moore, of Toronto, Canada, father of Danielle Moore, 24, who also died in that crash, said, “We spent an agonizing night thinking about these comments” in the documents. He called for an investigation that would “strip any professional accreditation from those who do not care about the safety of the flying public.”
Robert Clifford, the lead lawyer for the Ethiopian Airlines victims, said the documents will “be used by the families of the victims to show a jury that Boeing was reckless and put profits before safety.”
The Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS), the union representing some staff units within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), termed the messages “disheartening” and called for a reevaluation of the increased delegation of oversight granted by regulators to Boeing for airplane development.
U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said she is “deeply concerned” by the documents and Boeing’s apparent intent “to work around the FAA and foreign regulators.”
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives were particularly incensed by one document showing that, in order to avoid any need for additional pilot training, Boeing downplayed to the FAA the significance of the new flight control software on the Max – known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) – that was implicated in the two crash flights.
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee vice-chair Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett, said these “efforts to characterize the MCAS software as seemingly inconsequential were a serious mistake.”
He called for Congress to pull back some of Boeing’s authority to handle oversight of its own jet programs, a move that would likely slow certification of its upcoming new airplane, the Everett-built 777X.