Boeing gears up to renew safety culture after two 737 Max crashes

In response to the two deadly 737 Max crashes, Boeing’s Chief Aerospace Safety Officer Mike Delaney on Monday outlined how — beyond specific changes to its design practices and its manufacturing operations — the company’s leadership aims to rebuild and improve its entire safety culture.

Delaney said the new safety program he leads will focus not on looking back but on the future.

It will include enhanced oversight of safety; the use of analytical data from airlines, suppliers and Boeing’s factories to pinpoint risk; encouragement of employees to speak up when they notice safety issues; and partnering with airlines to ensure that the in-service fleet of Boeing jets remains safe.

To succeed, the top-down organizational restructuring Delaney outlined will require buyin and belief from the entire Boeing workforce.

“We have to move forward,” Delaney said. “And we’ve got to take 140,000 people with us.”

Speaking at Boeing’s Safety Promotion Center in Everett, Washington, designed to remind employees of the weighty responsibilities of their work by highlighting past air accidents, Delaney said engineering teams have done root-cause analysis to figure out what went wrong in the two crashes that killed 346 people and delivered a traumatic shock to the company.

Boeing has changed its design practices accordingly to take more account of pilot reactions, and to make sure automatic flight controls have limited authority and have sufficient sensors to ensure redundancy in case of a failure.

Speaking of frontline engineers and mechanics, Delaney said, “You want people to look steely-eyed back and say, ‘This will never happen again on my watch.’”

To achieve that, besides the fixes to the Max that allowed its return to service, Delaney said Boeing aims to make strategic and cultural changes.

Yet Delaney said employees, those involved in the Max’s development and those not, are in various phases of how they think about the crashes.

Some stress that they’ll “never forget” and want to move forward from there, while others “are maybe defensive. Some people are in denial,” he said.

Reflecting this internal ambivalence about culpability, Boeing’s top executives remain unwilling to publicly state that engineering design failures allowed the Max’s new flight control software — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — to overwhelm the pilots in the two crashes.

“I did not want this office to look like a commission on what went wrong or what didn’t go wrong,” Delaney said. “We are where we are. And we have to build forward ... We have to own it. We have to improve it.” ‘Never forget the accidents’ In the lobby of the Safety Promotion Center building, adjacent to the office towers where thousands of engineers work, a series of small alcoves lines the wall, each displaying a stopped watch with a date and a time marking the moment of a terrible airplane crash.

They include the 1985 Japan Air Lines Flight 123 crash of a 747 that killed 520 people, and the 1989 crash of a DC-10 in Sioux City, Iowa, that killed 112 people on United Airlines Flight 232.

As a visitor walks past these memorials, on the facing wall a new one catches the eye. A continuously running fall of water inside a glass display is dedicated to the memories of those who died in 2018 and 2019 in the two Max crashes.

The company is working on making the space accessible virtually to all its employees.

The purpose, Delaney said is “so that people can understand the design decisions, the history, never forget the accidents, the roles we’ve played in them.”