Boeing insisted new jets required little pilot training
By Natalie Kitroeff, David Gelles, Jack Nicas, Thomas Kapla and Maggie Haberman
The chief executive of Boeing backed down Wednesday. He called President Donald Trump to recommend that the United States temporarily take the company’s best-selling jet out of service, following two deadly crashes in less than five months.
Hours later, the president announced that the plane had been grounded.
It was a stark reversal for Boeing, an industrial juggernaut that has enjoyed a decade of rapid growth and has deep ties in Washington. Just the day before, the chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, had urged the president to keep the plane flying, as regulators around the world banned the jet.
The plane, the 737 Max, was deeply rooted in the company’s psyche, a reflection of its engineering prowess and its enviable safety record. But it was also born out of necessity as the company competed aggressively with its European rival Airbus.
The stakes for Boeing are high, with 4,600 pending orders that promise to bring in hundreds of billions of dollars. All that is at risk as regulators and lawmakers begin to investigate what went wrong with the doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight and an earlier one on Lion Air. Some carriers are already reconsidering their purchases.
One area of focus is whether the training procedures on Boeing’s jet, greenlighted by the Federal Aviation Administration, left pilots unprepared to deal with new software on the plane. When the plane was introduced, Boeing believed that pilots who had flown an earlier model didn’t need additional simulator training and regulators agreed. The FAA didn’t change those rules after the Lion Air crash in October and there are no plans to do so now.
Although the investigations are ongoing, preliminary evidence and data suggest potential similarities between the crashes, raising questions about the new software on which pilots weren’t trained. Evidence at the Ethiopia crash site suggests there could have been a problem with the software, an automated system designed to help avoid a stall, which has also come up in the Lion Air disaster.
When Airbus announced in 2010 that it would introduce a new fuel-efficient and cost-effective plane, Boeing rushed to get out its own version. The strategy depended heavily on building a plane that worked essentially the same as the previous generation. Regulators agreed that it was a derivative model and that it didn’t require additional simulator training, a significant savings for airlines.
For many new airplane models, pilots train for hours on giant, multimillion-dollar machines, onthe-ground versions of cockpits that mimic the flying experience and teach them new features. But in the case of the Max, many pilots with 737 experience learned about the plane on an iPad.
“We would have liked to have had a simulator” from the start, said Jon Weaks, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association. “But it wasn’t practical, because it wasn’t built yet.”
When United was set to take delivery of the 737 Max in 2017, a group of pilots put together training materials without ever flying the aircraft or a full simulator. James LaRosa, a 737 captain and union official who helped lead the training group, said he flew to a Boeing training center in Seattle to learn about the new plane on a mock cockpit that didn’t move like typical simulators.
In addition to a two-hour iPad training course from Boeing, he and colleagues used their experience in the cockpit to create a 13-page handbook on the differences between the Max and its predecessor, including changes to displays and the engines. The training materials did not mention the new software that later became a focus of the Lion Air crash investigation.
“When you find out that there are systems on it that are wildly different that affect the performance of the aircraft, having a simulator is part of a safety culture,” said Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the American Airlines pilot union and a 737 pilot. “It can be the difference between a safe, recoverable flight and one that makes the newspapers.”
Boeing said in a statement that “the 737 Max was certified in accordance with the identical FAA requirements and processes that have governed certification of all previous new airplanes and derivatives.”
“The FAA’s aircraft certification processes are well established and have consistently produced safe aircraft designs,” the regulator said in a statement.
It is unclear when the planes will start flying again. The company is expected to roll out a software fix by April, which will modify features of the jet around the automated system.
But Boeing isn’t planning to overhaul its training procedures. And neither the FAA, nor the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, are proposing additional simulator training for pilots, according to a person familiar with the deliberations. Instead, the regulators and Boeing agree that the best way to inform pilots about the new software is through additional computer-based training, which can be done on their personal computers.