Boeing insisted that new jets required little pilot training
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, after two deadly crashes in less than five months. Hours later, Trump 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 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, on-theground 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.”
As Boeing pushed to get the plane done, flights simulators designed specifically for the Max weren’t ready. Greg Bowen, training and standards chair at the Southwest pilots association, said that senior leadership at the carrier told him the engineering data necessary to design simulator software was still being finalized right up until the plane was nearly completed.
“They were building the airplane and still designing it,” Bowen said. “The data to build a simulator didn’t become available until about when the plane was ready to fly.”
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 13page 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.
After the crash, it was clear that pilots of the 737 Max had not been fully informed about the new software. Shortly after Thanksgiving, pilot unions from Southwest and American met separately with Boeing officials. The unions wanted answers.
“The first thing we talked about was the break of trust,” said Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the American Airlines pilot union and a 737 pilot. “We called it disrespectful.”
According to Tajer, Boeing officials told American’s pilots that they hadn’t mentioned the new software because they didn’t want to “inundate” them with information. The union told Boeing that it was now demanding simulators for its pilots. “We don’t really care what the FAA requires,” Tajer said, recalling the meeting.