Boeing documents show ‘very disturbing employee concerns’
Boeing provided a fresh batch of incriminating documents on the 737 MAX to regulators and congressional investigators, only hours after announcing a leadership shakeup, officials have confirmed.
The document dump came just before Christmas, when many officials already are on holiday, and “appear to point to a very disturbing picture” about Boeing’s response to safety issues regarding the 737 MAX, a congressional aide told AFP in an email on Tuesday. The aide said Boeing sent the documents “late in the evening” on Monday to congressional staff investigating the issues with the aircraft, which has been grounded since March following two crashes that killed 346 people.
The aerospace giant has faced scrutiny over its decision to keep flying the plane after the first crash and to brush off safety concerns of some employees, and over whether it sacrificed safety in the race to develop a plane to compete with an Airbus jet.
US regulators also have been criticized for a too-cozy relationship with the company it is charged with overseeing.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed it received what appear to be the same documents on Monday afternoon, a few hours after Boeing ousted Dennis Muilenburg as chief executive amid his much-criticized handling of the MAX crisis. Boeing said it “proactively” contacted the FAA and Congress “as part of our commitment to transparency,” a company spokesman said in email. “As with prior documents referenced by the committee, the tone and content of some of these communications does not reflect the company we are and need to be.” The spokesman also highlighted changes Boeing has made “in the past nine months to enhance our safety processes, organization and culture.” That references the period after the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March.
The first 737 MAX crash of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia happened five months earlier. The latest revelations make it clear that despite shaking up its leadership, Boeing will continue to face questions well into 2020 over the actions that led to the crashes as it tries to win approval to return the MAX to service and to restore its damaged reputation.
The document dump — which surfaced on a normally tranquil Christmas Eve — came hours after Boeing announced it was replacing Muilenburg with Chairman David Calhoun, saying the company needed to “restore confidence” and “repair relationships with regulators, customers and all other stakeholders.”
FAA Chief Steve Dickson ripped Boeing in October after the company only provided the agency with revealing documents months after unearthing the records. In one text message exchange that surfaced in those documents, a Boeing pilot described a problem on a simulator with a flight handling system that has been implicated in both crashes.
The aide with the House Transportation Committee declined to release the latest papers.
FASTFACT
The CEO shakeup at Boeing drew muted response from Wall Street analysts, a bombshell that came only days after the company took the monumental step of halting production on the 737 MAX and a day after it suffered a setback on a highprofile NASA mission.