Would YOU take off in a ‘FLYING COFFIN’?
That’s what a U.S. senator dubbed Boeing’s new 737 MAX after two crashes killed 346. The company now says its fleet could be back in the skies within weeks. But the question remains: did they put profit before safety?
Highly charged and deeply emotional, it was one of those rare moments when a rapacious corporation is forced to come face to face with its victims.
in front of a Senate committee in Washington DC two weeks ago, a delegation of highly paid executives from Boeing turned uncomfortably in their seats to find themselves just feet away from some of the families of 346 passengers who died in two crashes of the new Boeing 737 MAX jets.
The team from the world’s biggest aerospace company had no idea the grieving relatives had been invited to the hearing into the tragedies.
grim-faced, the 20 mourners were urged by Senator Richard Blumenthal to rise from their seats and hold up photographs of their loved ones. ‘These people were in flying coffins,’ thundered Mr Blumenthal. ‘Boeing came to my office and said the crashes were a result of pilot error. The pilots never had a chance.’
The U.S. giant, until recently one of the world’s most admired companies, is immensely powerful and notoriously arrogant. however, its chief executive Dennis Muilenburg could not maintain his usual swagger on this occasion. he seemed almost sheepish as he apologised for the firm’s mistakes, first to a battery of angry senators, and then to Nadia Milleron, whose daughter died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March.
‘Turn and look at people when you say you’re sorry,’ she barked at him as he left the room. The mogul, who last year earned £23million, meekly did as he was told.
As he underwent another brutal grilling the following day over both the Ethiopian crash and the lion Air disaster in indonesia in October 2018, Mr Muilenburg, 55, was left literally red-faced under the withering criticism from politicians.
The 737 MAX, the supposedly state-of-the-art version of the world’s most popular passenger jet with up to 230 seats, has been grounded by regulators worldwide since the crash in March.
Shares in Boeing have now bounced back a little following reports that it expects to get approval to return the plane to service by December. it will take longer to get the 737 MAX back in the air with passengers as it still needs to iron out new pilot training with aviation regulators.
But there’s little cause for much cheer at the company. in just the past few days, a string of new accusations and revelations have further fuelled claims that Boeing — aided and abetted by the U.S. government — has put profits before safety and people have died as a result.
This is a growing crisis that affects anyone who flies. if one model of car develops problems, customers can easily switch to another. But when it comes to passenger aircraft, Boeing and Europe’s Airbus are the only options for nearly all flights globally.
Now Ryanair, Europe’s busiest short-haul carrier, has become the latest airline to ground an earlier version of the 737, the 737-Ng, after cracks were discovered on the ‘pickle fork’, a part of the aircraft that strengthens the connection between the body and the wing.
So far, similar cracks have been identified in 50 planes around the world. The irish budget airline, which identified cracks in three of its planes, is already cutting jobs and closing bases because of the continuing delay in delivery of new 737 MAX planes it had ordered.
The long delay in getting the fleet — some 700 planes in all — back in the air has been blamed on computer software problems as Boeing faces intense scrutiny over its safety and quality standards.
BOEiNg’S woes don’t end there. A whistleblower also claimed last week that passengers on the company’s 787 Dreamliner — it can seat up to 330 passengers — could be left without oxygen if the cabin were to decompress suddenly.
John Barnett, a former Boeing quality control engineer, claims managers ignored his warning that the oxygen systems were substandard. he also alleges faulty parts were deliberately fitted in planes to hurry them off the production line at its South Carolina factory.
Boeing has rejected Mr Barnett’s claims. however, the suggestion that the U.S. plane giant cuts corners to save money chimes with the evidence
esented in Washington in the 737 MAX hearings. Mr Muilenburg has announced he will not take a bonus this year — last year, he got £10.1 million. But that — together with his grovelling apologies — may be little consolation to bereaved relatives who insist he deserves to go to prison for one of the biggest scandals in aviation history. According to critics — some of whom insist Boeing should never be allowed to build planes again — what sets the 737 MAX tragedies apart from other air crashes, which are usually unforeseeable accidents, is that they were inevitable. last month’s Senate hearing was held a year to the day after a 737 MAX nose-dived into the sea shortly after takeoff from Jakarta airport in indonesia. All 189 people on board lion Air flight 610 died. Five months later, the 157 passengers and crew of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 met the same fate, plunging into a field on a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi. As with the Indosian plane, the 737 experienced problems almost immediately after take off and hurtled out of the sky. Being is continuing to work on a fault with its MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), an automated flight control system installed in the 737 MAX that investigators have blamed — along with poor training — for both accidents. Designed to react to the plane ascending too steeply during take-off and so stalling, MCAS instead nudges the jet’s nose downwards.
Sensors outside the plane, known as angle of attack (AOA) indicators, are supposed to provide pilots and airplane systems with reliable information on where the nose is pointing in relation to oncoming wind.
However, in both crashes, faulty data from a single sensor triggered the MCAS, repeatedly forcing the planes’ noses down as pilots struggled fruitlessly to regain control.
The decision to have MCAS rely on just one sensor has been a key issue in investigations as experts say it increased the chance of the system being confused by erroneous data.
The 737 MAX, which was originally intended for short-haul flights but has been used to cross the Atlantic, is central to Boeing’s future plans. Before the current crisis, it was producing a new 737 every ten days.
Predictably, the fiasco has had a catastrophic effect on Boeing’s finances — its profits were slashed by half in the latest quarter, from $2.36billion to $1.17billion, and its sales dropped a fifth to $20 billion.
The company has a backlog of more than 5,000 MAX jets waiting to be built for airlines, and is estimated to have lost $9billion as a result of the 737 MAX’s grounding. Airlines have also lost billions because of cancelled flights.
That’s hardly likely to be the end of it. The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation into how Boeing convinced regulators the plane was safe to fly.
Boeing insiders say the company has been heading for disaster since it bought a struggling rival, McDonnell Douglas, in 1996 for $13billion. Suddenly, they say, safety and reliability-minded engineers stopped running the company and beancounting executives instead called the shots. Engineers were warned against voicing concerns and told to ‘follow the plan’ or be sacked.
THE development of the 737 MAX was rushed through by Boeing in 2011 to see off competition from Airbus. Proposed design changes to the existing 737 involved altering the aerodynamics of the wings so they could have bigger engines.
But Boeing hit on the much cheaper option of installing the antistall software system MCAS.
It’s since emerged that concerns over MCAS as well as the adequacy of 737 MAX pilot training and other safety-related issues were raised within Boeing years before the first crash. Despite the warnings, Boeing — fixated on its bottom line, say critics — did little about them and didn’t mention them to regulators.
What has become apparent within the past year is that both crashes were preventable.
Mr Muilenburg has repeatedly said he was ‘accountable’ for the failures that led to the crashes but has refused to resign — although he has stepped down as chairman — even in the face of a flurry of damning leaked internal communications.
In 2015, a Boeing engineer warned in an email that the MAX might be ‘vulnerable’ to a single sensor failing — which is precisely what occurred in both crashes.
Text messages dating back to 2016 from Mark Forkner, a top Boeing test pilot of the plane, show him telling a colleague the MCAS control system was ‘running rampant’ in a flight simulator and behaving in an ‘egregious’ manner. In internal Boeing documents, Mr Forkner said he had ‘basically lied to the regulators’.
Just four months before the first crash, a senior Boeing production manager warned ‘exhausted’ staff could make dangerous mistakes.
‘For for the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane,’ he wrote in an email.
He’s hardly alone now. The three U.S. airlines that operate the 737 MAX plan to hold hundreds of demonstration flights — some with their senior executives on board — to reassure passengers it’s safe to fly.
But Simon Hradecky, a leading crash expert, said: ‘I’d want to know exactly what has changed on the 737 MAX [since the crashes] before I ever set foot in one again.’
In a potentially drastic development, U.S. airline United says it will allow passengers to change flights if they find they’re booked on a 737 MAX. If other airlines follow suit — as they may feel pressured to do — there could be utter chaos at airports.
Boeing’s critics accuse the company of a gigantic cover-up. U.S. senator Richard Blumenthal said the two crashes were ‘the result of a pattern of deliberate concealment’.
A particularly heinous example, he said, was the fact that MCAS was mentioned just once in the 1,600page 737 MAX pilot’s manual.
But Boeing isn’t the only villain. The U.S. air regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), has come in for considerable criticism over its cosy relationship with Boeing, a company it is supposed to police.
A decade ago, Boeing was America’s biggest exporter. Successive U.S. presidents since Ronald Reagan deregulated the aviation industry to the point that — astonishingly — Boeing was allowed to supervise safety tests on its own jets.
FAA engineers whose job it was to vet flight control systems — like the one that failed on the 737 MAX — no longer needed a four-year computer science degree, but were merely sent on a two-week course.
So not only did the FAA rapidly approve a plane that has since developed critical safety issues, it also acted as a cheerleader for Boeing when things went wrong — senior
FAA officials assured politicians that the first crash was a ‘one-off’.
When regulators around the world ordered 737 MAX fleets to be grounded immediately after the second crash, the FAA refused to follow suit, arguing there was insufficient evidence to justify such action.
It was only after the other regulators barred the 737 MAX fleet from their airspace that the FAA finally gave in to safety concerns.
It has also become apparent that Boeing kept the FAA in the dark on occasions. For example, although the company told the FAA that pilots would react to a problem with MCAS in four seconds (based on the reaction time of its highly experienced test pilots), it kept quiet about research showing that if it took them just six seconds longer than that, the consequences would be ‘catastrophic’.
And so it twice proved, said outraged politicians, as the Lion Air and Indonesian pilots failed to regain control of their planes in time.
Analysts say it hasn’t helped that Boeing gets special treatment in the U.S. because it is a huge employer (more than 137,000 people), pays scores of Washington lobbyists, and a quarter of its $100 billion or so annual sales are to the Pentagon.
An aviation expert told the Mail it was ‘better to see Boeing as an arm of government’ than a public company.
SO BOEINg is in the dock, but what is perhaps even more serious is that the credibility of the FAA has been crippled by the debacle. The rest of the world will no longer take America’s word for it that the 737 MAX is fit go back up.
Aviation experts contacted by the Mail agree Boeing isn’t the only party at fault. Neither Indonesia nor Ethiopia have well-regarded airlines.
Industry insiders believe there were two similar incidents involving 737 MAX planes in the U.S. last year but, in both cases, the pilot managed to stop the plane from going into a terminal nosedive.
The implication, said one analyst, is that while the 737 MAX is a plane that doesn’t leave much margin for error, experienced pilots will be able to handle the problems that overcome less able ones.
However, Chesley Sullenberger, the heroic pilot — played by Tom Hanks in the 2016 film Sully — who saved passengers by crash-landing on New York’s Hudson river, says the MCAS system was ‘fatally flawed and should never have been approved’. He says the ‘startle effect’, whereby a sudden emergency impairs a pilot’s response, cannot be overstated.
Regulators around the world won’t be in a hurry to clear the 737 MAX for take-off.
And however long the delay, getting the plane back in the air is one thing, but getting passengers and crews to step on board once more may prove to be quite another.