Book: Flying Blind: The 737 MAX tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
Author: Peter Robison
Genre: History
Rating: ★★★★
REVIEW
Reading Flying Blind felt like a journey through a maze of corporate decisions that led to one of the darkest moments in aviation history. Robison paints a picture where the lines between corporate gain, political influence, and safety just blur into ONE BIG MESS.
At times, the book can be a bit of a slog, like sitting through a lecture on the evolution of corporate culture rather than a gripping narrative. But maybe that’s the point. It forces you to look beyond the headlines and digs into how decisions are made behind closed doors, away from the glossy PR and annual reports.
Boeing, once all about engineering excellence, it seemed like it got caught up in chasing dollars over safety. This cultural shift from innovation to financial metrics is a reminder of how a company can lose its way. The narrative around the MCAS system was particularly telling like how something meant to assist could end up contributing to tragedy because of shortcuts taken in the name of expediency.
The crashes of the Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 weren’t just accidents. They were illustrations of how decisions made in boardrooms can have deadly consequences in the skies. And It’s gross to see how quickly corporations can mobilise to protect their interests while families are still grappling with loss. The contrast between the immediate legal response and the slow, painstaking identification of victims illustrates a profound ethical disconnection.
And the relationship between Boeing and the FAA was just mind blowning. How can we fly with confidence when the guardians of our safety are compromised by the very companies they’re supposed to regulate? It makes one ponder the integrity of the systems we rely on for our safety.
Flying Blind isn’t just a story about Boeing. It’s a critique on how capitalism can fly too close to the sun when safety is traded for efficiency. It raises ethical questions that are relevant beyond aviation: At what point does cutting costs become life-threatening? Can a company ever regain its soul once it’s been sold to the highest bidder?
EXCERPTS
A commercial aircraft presented vastly greater challenges, for reasons still true today. Most obviously, there’s no government contract putting a floor under revenue for passenger planes, promising a certain return if milestones are met. For a commercial plane, the capital to turn a blueprint into reality—the massive sums for machinery, tools, engineers, mechanics, pilots, flight testing, marketing, administration, regulatory affairs, customer service—all comes up front. After years of expense, the manufacturer has a single product, with no guarantee of sales.
CH #1 The Incredibles
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
Undeterred, Boeing doubled down on the risk it had taken with the 707, betting even more money—ultimately the entire net worth of the company —on its massive 747. The gamble almost bankrupted Boeing before it was proven to be sound. The plane would become one of the most iconic in history. Three times bigger than anything in the sky, it required the coinage of a new term—“jumbo jet.” It was the first commercial aircraft with twin aisles for seating, and even had a second deck in its distinctive hump. But what really drew early customers like Pan Am was the aircraft’s range: at almost eight thousand miles, it brought transatlantic travel to the masses.
CH #1 The Incredibles
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
Airbus, meanwhile, became the genuine threat to Boeing that some had feared. Lufthansa bought fifteen of the new A320s for $1 billion in 1985, and a year later Northwest Airlines placed a massive order for as many as one hundred, opening the door to sustained success for the European plane maker. Boeing eventually introduced larger 737s known as the 737-400 and 737-500, but it was too late to blunt the impact from Airbus. “In the aviation industry, you make these [new airplane] decisions every ten years, give or take a few,” the analyst Wolfgang Demisch of First Boston said. “You then have to live with the consequences for the next fifty.”
CH #2 Mea Cupla
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
In a measure of his intensity, he [Alan Mulally] frequently ended meetings by pulling out a marker to write down on one of the plastic transparency sheets under the overhead projector what each person had agreed to do and having them all sign it. “Accountability is huge with him,” said a former lieutenant. “Burying things and letting them fester—Darth Vader comes out.”
CH #3 Jack Welch, Look Out
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
Given the perilous state of their business, Stonecipher and McDonnell decided it was time to get serious about selling to Boeing. They wrote down four items they considered nonnegotiable: the price, the number of board seats allotted to McDonnell Douglas directors, a leadership role for Stonecipher, and the combined company’s name. It had to be the Boeing McDonnell Corporation. […]
At a meeting a week later, Boeing’s board blessed the purchase, agreeing to pay $13.3 billion in stock.[…]The only one of those items Stonecipher and his boss John McDonnell didn’t get: Boeing would remain Boeing, at least in name.
CH #3 Jack Welch, Look Out
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
In his home office, Peter Morton kept a list of “things to remember”: Courage. Will. Perseverance. Skill. “And in flying, the superior pilot uses superior judgment to avoid situations that might require the use of superior skill!”
CH #4 Hunter Killer Assassins
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
As Boeing ramped up work on the Dreamliner in 2005, its R&D spending, at 4.8 percent of commercial sales, was just over half that of Airbus, estimated Morgan Stanley analyst Heidi Wood. Stonecipher sold off giant parts-making operations, including a factory in Wichita that Boeing had owned for seventy-five years and employed seventy-two hundred people. It may have improved the RONA numbers, but it made everyone’s jobs harder. Now when they needed a part at the last minute or had an idea for a process improvement, it wasn’t a call with a colleague; it was a negotiation with lawyers, procurement-chain executives, human-resources representatives—all the overhead hassles Hart-Smith had warned about in his treatise.
CH #5 Everybody Think They’re Different
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
Boeing—the epitome of American engineering excellence—was going downmarket. It even started selling bare-bones versions, offering as options equipment that Airbus sold as standard. A backup fire extinguisher in the cargo hold, for instance, cost extra. This was permissible because a backup wasn’t mandated by the FAA. (In places including Japan, however, regulators did require it, mindful of incidents in which the primary system had failed.) In another fateful example, Boeing charged $80,000 for an angle-of-attack indicator—the seemingly peripheral cockpit gauge whose absence would figure in the doomed Lion Air and Ethiopian flights, neither of which was equipped with the optional equipment.
CH #6 The Corporate Playbook
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
The Airbus team courted American’s CEO, Gerard Arpey, and its president, Tom Horton, over frequent lunches at the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, a boutique hotel where they didn’t think they’d be spotted. Moving to the Ritz-Carlton during a stretch of hundred-degree days lasting nearly two weeks that July, they reached agreement on an order for hundreds of planes. Arpey called Albaugh to let him know the carrier was ready to buy Airbus aircraft; what could Boeing do for them? […]
Within a week, Boeing made a counterproposal for a hypothetical 737 outfitted with more powerful engines, a model so new it didn’t yet have a name. The world would come to know it as the 737 MAX 8.
CH #6 The Corporate Playbook
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
McSweeny, later to become a Boeing lobbyist, began soliciting advice from industry working groups on how to cut the onerous costs of certifying airplanes for flight. One of them, led by Webster Heath, Boeing’s senior manager of technical affairs, sent its recommendations to McSweeny in October 1998, asking for the “earliest possible issuance” of a new rule transferring more authority to the manufacturers themselves. Plane makers wanted license, in other words, to deputize and police themselves.
CH #7 The Forrest Gumps
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
Almost immediately, Boeing began wielding the authority it had gained in this new system, which had the comically opaque name of Organization Designation Authorization. Now that the company was in charge of choosing its own deputies, it began putting more junior employees into the roles, often recent college graduates. Ronell and others believed it was because they’d be more willing to listen to their managers, less likely to dig in their heels than senior staff. “It’s basically asking companies to oversee themselves,” he said.
CH #7 The Forrest Gumps
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
McNerney’s phrase—“more for less”—became the company’s driving theme as it embarked on the MAX, a sharp contrast to “Working Together,” the motto Phil Condit had advanced in the early 1990s during the successful creation of the 777. The implications were clear: More performance, lower cost. More range, less fuel burn. But also: more work, fewer people. And ultimately: more risk, catastrophic return.
CH #8 The Countdown Clock
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
What’s more, low-cost Southwest Airlines, the biggest customer, had no desire to push the envelope. It wanted its ten thousand pilots to be able to step into the new plane without any additional training, which would save it huge costs as well as logistical headaches. Early in the program, Boeing managers told the flight controls team that under no circumstances were they to make any changes that would require pilots switching from the previous 737 to the MAX to step into a simulator. The reason: Boeing had promised Southwest $1 million per airplane if simulator training was required—and the carrier by 2019 had ordered 246. That was all the incentive Boeing needed.
CH #8 The Countdown Clock
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
Boeing’s engineers wondered if they should even refer to the existence of MCAS at all. They decided in June 2013 to use the name internally but externally to refer to it as just a tweak of the existing electronic flight controls, reducing the chance that anyone would ask questions about it. “If we emphasize MCAS is a new function there may be a greater certification and training impact,” said a memo that month, summarizing their discussion. An ancillary benefit was less work for everyone. As the memo noted, if everyone agreed it was just part of the same old system, no one would have to design any training or update the manual.
CH #8 The Countdown Clock
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
By the end of that March, the engineers and test pilots had arrived at a solution. Again—all but unavoidably at this late stage—the answer would be the software. They would expand MCAS to cover low speeds as well as high. It had the benefit, once more, of being cheap. “All changes are minimal / low collateral damage, therefore no additional flight testing,” one memo said. The same day Leverkuhn and Teal approved the plan, Forkner emailed the FAA’s Klein for permission to delete MCAS from the flight manual because it “only operates WAY outside of the normal operating envelope.” Still focused on his mission of minimizing training, he possibly didn’t even know about the software changes. Klein certainly didn’t; she agreed.
CH #9 Human Factors
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
Critically, at low speed, this meant that a second sensor necessary to ensure redundancy—the accelerometer measuring g-forces at high speeds— was no longer applicable. The software would now fire on the basis of a single sensor, the angle-of-attack vane. And it would do so at low speeds, which usually meant when a plane was most vulnerable: at takeoff or landing. No one appears to have fully considered the human factors—how a failure in the single sensor would make the plane appear to go haywire at a time when pilots were already busy and dangerously close to the ground.
CH #9 Human Factors
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
Eventually one more mistake would be discovered: An alert showing a discrepancy between the two angle-of-attack vanes wasn’t lighting up on a majority of the MAX planes Boeing had started delivering. The alert was mistakenly tied to an optional indicator showing the raw angle-of-attack data, which most airlines (including Southwest and Lion Air) hadn’t paid for. Boeing’s engineers decided to defer a fix until the next software update —in 2020.
CH #9 Human Factors
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
Back on the ground, the captain documented what had happened in the logbook, and Lion Air’s mechanics got to work clearing the plane for the next flight. The captain’s note included the alerts he’d seen—ALT DISAGREE, IAS DISAGREE, and FEEL DIFF PRESS (indicating bad altitude, airspeed, and hydraulic pressure). He and the mechanics never saw the alert that would have pinpointed the problem—AOA DISAGREE, suggesting a discrepancy between the left and right angle-of-attack vanes. The reason: Lion Air hadn’t paid for it. They had purchased a bare-bones MAX plane, with no such indicator. Moreover, Boeing had never disclosed the potential issue to customers.
CH #10 Crash
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
The notary was there along with two officials from Lion Air, and they showed her a release form that she’d need to sign to claim 1.3 billion rupiah, or $91,600. “I was not in a state to sign anything,” Rini said. A petroleum engineer who also happened to be fluent in English, she scanned an appendix that listed eight pages of companies grouped into two columns, more than four hundred names in all—including Boeing, Lion Air, and a who’s who of the world’s major aerospace suppliers. All were to be released from liability in any global court in exchange for the money. She asked if she could take the document home and study it; they told her it couldn’t leave the room. Rini left without signing it. That evening, someone from the forensics lab called to say her sister’s remains had been identified.
It was hard to imagine that a low-fare airline had mobilized such a well-coordinated legal response just a few days after the crash; solving the puzzle of who did became a consuming passion for Rini and the lawyers she eventually hired.
CH #10 Crash
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
An operator at Boeing’s twenty-four-hour crisis center was the first to tell its chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg. Two crashes in five months. It was the scenario every company fears: a public panic over product safety puncturing a carefully groomed reputation. When James Burke, the chairman of Johnson & Johnson, learned in 1982 that cyanide-laced bottles of Tylenol in Chicago had killed seven people, he asked two questions: “How do we protect people? And second, how do we save the product?” The answer to both questions turned out to be the same: By putting safety first, Tylenol saved the product. Burke told consumers to stop buying Tylenol, withdrew advertising, halted production, and pulled the pills off shelves. It was a huge financial blow—Tylenol accounted for 19 percent of the company’s profits—but the swift action ensured no further loss of life. Burke’s response is now considered a classic in corporate crisis management.
The test of faith and leadership Muilenburg had confidently talked about onstage had arrived. He led a late-night discussion soon after the crash with senior leaders including Anne Toulouse, the head of communications. Much like Burke, he zeroed in on two key questions, starting with safety. “Is the MAX safe? And was MCAS involved?” But unlike the Johnson & Johnson chairman, he’d already convinced himself of the answers—and protecting the product came before people. “We need to make a strong statement on the first, and be clear that there are no supporting facts on the second,” Muilenburg wrote later that day to Toulouse, who was in the midst of drafting the company’s response.
CH #11 The Death Jet
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
Too late to avert catastrophe, the software update that Sinnett had been promising since November was finally getting close to completion. Boeing had expected to hand over the final specifications to the FAA in April, six months (and not six weeks–ish, as Sinnett had said) after the first crash. A date had even been scheduled for Stacey Klein, the Aircraft Evaluation chief who’d worked with Forkner, to evaluate the revised software in a simulator in Miami. That date, March 13, turned out to be three days after the crash in Ethiopia. Boeing had been so confident MCAS was fixed that it was actually seeking training even less stringent than the couple of hours on an iPad already approved. This time it had asked for Level A training, the least intensive possible. Pilots simply would be provided with highlighted pages of the operating manual—no test or further practice required.
CH #11 The Death Jet
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
Once he’d finished his investigation, the issues seemed so clear: The dangerous flaw revealed by the Lion Air crash. The pattern of rewarding shareholders and top executives while skimping on investments. The neutering of the FAA. It sent him into an even deeper depression, certain that he could have saved his family if only he had paid better attention. Representative Sam Graves’s remarks at the May hearing, laying blame on the pilots, further disgusted him. “I felt that the reason why my family died was because when the first crash happened in October of 2018 it happened in Indonesia and not in the U.S. or Canada or the U.K., where lives matter more than in other places,” he said. “The Indonesian people were seen as mere Indonesians. And that’s why Boeing never felt compelled to ground the planes.”
CH #12 Blood Money
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
Muilenburg at last, on December 16, said Boeing would halt production. He had been adamant that the MAX would fly by year’s end. Missing the deadline finally ruined his credibility with the last and most critical corner of his constituency—investors. When a Boeing Starliner capsule, developed to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station, failed to reach orbit in an unmanned test launch four days later, it was one last headline-grabbing embarrassment under Muilenburg’s watch. The board met the next Sunday, December 22, and voted to fire him.
With Muilenburg’s ouster, Calhoun was installed as CEO. A board member since 2009, he had collected $3.4 million in compensation and served through every stage of the MAX’s fraught birth and frenzied development. An old friend of Jim McNerney’s, he used to play a regular foursome of golf with Jack Welch at GE.
The face at the top of Boeing may have changed, in other words, but the playbook had not.
CH #13 Go Back to the Farm
Flying Blind by Peter Robinson
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