Flying Blind
The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing Peter Robison Penguin Business, £20
In March 2019, global regulators were forced to ground Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft after the second of two deadly disasters. It became clear that not only were there “serious safety concerns” about the craft, but that managers at Boeing had tried to hide its shortcomings from both customers and regulators, says Jon Gertner in The Washington Post. In
Flying Blind, investigative journalist Peter Robison looks at the “flawed series of decisions” that “sealed the fate of hundreds of innocent passengers” and traces how a company once renowned for “perfectionism” and “engineering prowess” went “so wildly off course”.
This is an “authoritative, gripping and finely-detailed narrative that charts the decline of one of the great American companies”, says David Gelles in The New York Times. Robison lays the “ultimate blame” on the culture change that followed the decision to merge with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. This brought in a team of highly-paid executives who wanted to transform Boeing from a company “ruled by engineers” into “one of the most shareholder-friendly creatures of the market”, creating a culture of cost-cutting and the aggressive lobbying of regulators.
Robison “idealises the pre-merger Boeing”, but overlooks the fact that its “parts acquisition and design had been a mess for years”, relying on “a mix of paperwork and 400 separate computer systems”, says Michael Skapinker in the Financial Times. Its previous executives also arrogantly underestimated the rise of Airbus. Still, this is a “compelling, deeply reported account” that indicts one of America’s most celebrated companies and the “politicians who believed business knew best”. In the end, the cutting of costs and corners was not only tragic, says Roger Lowenstein in The Wall Street Journal, it was also “bad business”. “Far more money was spent on lawyers, victims’ families, retooling and lost flight time than on Boeing’s supposedly quick fix” for flagged problems.