THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019 59
tivate me today,” Njoroge said. “Because,
after this happens, I start asking my-
self, What is the essence of life? And I
find myself very demotivated. What am
I going to do with my life?”
“Is this your entire family?” Nader said.
“Yes, my entire family.”
The man who had taken to Capitol
Hill a half century earlier advised, “You
have a few months of opportunity—
because of your loss—that very few peo-
ple have to get in the door. Door after
door after door.” Nader continued, “That
requires study. You have to study the
committees—who they are, all that.”
“Yes, yes.”
“You’ll see who is slowing down the
hearings, who wants to push the hear-
ings, who they want to testify, who they
don’t want to testify,” Nader said. “I would
suggest you make this .. .” He searched
for the right word. “This is the one that
took your family,” he said. “You can learn
all the players. All the variables.” He sug-
gested that Njoroge get the congressio-
nal handbook, which lists the members
of Congress and their committees.
There was some pathos in Nader’s
insights on Congress, which dated to
another era, when committees wielded
more power, when staff had more ex-
pertise, when members displayed more
independence. His advice was infused
with an idealism bordering on nostal-
gia: this is how one would take one’s
cause to Congress, if Congress still func-
tioned as it should.
The Stumos returned to Washing-
ton a month later, for a hearing before
the House aviation subcommittee. They
had attended two previous hearings,
holding a large poster with photographs
of dozens of the Ethiopian Air victims.
This was the first time they were al-
lowed to testify. As the hearing was
about to begin, Boeing announced that
it was setting aside fifty million dollars
to help victims’ families, which the Stu-
mos felt was a transparent attempt to
preëmpt the hearings.
At Michael’s urging, Njoroge led off
the testimony, memorializing his five
lost family members. Michael, who had
testified at congressional hearings be-
fore, handled the committee’s questions
with ease. At one point, he sketched out
what future hearings on the 737 MAX
should include. “Any whistle-blowers
who may have been fired, and maybe
have a gag order pursuant to a settle-
ment—who have complained about
safety issues with regard to the 737
MAX—should be called to testify, with
protective subpoenas, so the public can
hear what they have to say,” he told the
subcommittee. “The aviation-software
writers—do they have the same level
of engineering safety culture as regular
aviation engineers?”
Michael’s restrained, lawyerly tone
reminded me of something he had told
me weeks earlier about the many meet-
ings that he and Nadia had been hav-
ing with members of Congress: “Nadia
would pound them over the head. I’m
a little more Iowa about it.”
A week later, Ali Bahrami, who in
2017 left lobbying to return to the F.A.A.
as its chief of aviation safety, appeared
at a Senate hearing. The Wall Street
Journal had just reported that the F.A.A.
had determined, after the Lion Air
crash, that there was a high risk of an-
other 737 MAX emergency within the
next ten months, but had decided to
allow Boeing to proceed with its soft-
ware fix without grounding the planes.
Bahrami said, “From the safety per-
spective, we felt strongly that what we
did was adequate.”
Nadia was furious. At midnight, she
and Tor started making signs—one read
“FAA gambled 10 months and lost 346
lives.” At 2 A.M., they got into the car
and drove to Washington. When they
arrived at the F.A.A., a Homeland Se-
curity officer refused to let them enter.
Eventually, they were called in to meet
with Bahrami. As Tor related in a re-
cording that he made immediately af-
terward, they asked Bahrami what he
thought he could have done to prevent
the Ethiopia crash. Bahrami said that
there was nothing he could have done.
(Bahrami does not recall saying this.)
“I can tell you what you should’ve done,”
Tor told him. “You should have grounded
the plane after the Indonesian crash.”
Then he and Nadia drove the seven
hours back home.I
n May, at the first House hearing on
the 737 MAX, the top-ranking Repub-
lican on the transportation committee,
Sam Graves, of Missouri, blamed the
pilots. A pilot himself, he criticized Yared
Getachew, the Ethiopian Airlines pilot,
for going too fast, making recovery moredifficult, and for following “no operat-
ing procedure that I have heard of.” “You
have to know how to fly the plane!”
Graves said. “It just bothers me that we
continue to tear down our system based
on what has happened in another coun-
try.” Elwell, the interim F.A.A. chief,
said that the Ethiopian pilots should
have overcome MCAS “via a checklist
they should have memorized,” and that
they “never controlled their air speed.”
In September, in the Times Maga-
zine, William Langewiesche, also a pilot,
argued that inadequate pilot training
in countries like Indonesia was “just as
guilty” in the 737 MAX disasters as the
planes’ malfunctions. The article sug-
gested that Boeing was being maligned,
in a “public onslaught” that included
“exploitation of personal tragedy and
the construction of a whole new eco-
nomic sector built around perceptions
of the company’s liability.”
Pilot training in Indonesia leaves a
great deal to be desired. (Ethiopian Air-
lines has long been held in higher re-
gard—for one thing, the U.S. paid for
general training of the airline’s staff
after it ordered forty 737 MAX planes,
in 2015.) But to conclude that pilot error
was the overriding cause of the crashes
requires downplaying a string of reve-
lations about Boeing, the 737 MAX, and
the F.A.A. which began to emerge soon
after the second crash.
The Seattle Times reported that
MCAS had initially been designed to
be much weaker and to kick in only at
high airspeed, which is why Boeing al-
lowed just one angle-of-attack sensor
to activate it. But the company later
revised MCAS to deploy at lower air-
speed, and with greater force—yet left
it with just a single sensor for activa-
tion. Even as MCAS grew stronger, over-
sight of the system was delegated to
Boeing. The New York Times reported
that F.A.A. officials were surprised to
learn crucial details about MCAS only
after the Lion Air crash.
The F.A.A. has said that it lacked
the resources to oversee the plane’s up-
dates, but the veteran F.A.A. engineer
in Seattle told me that this was because
of the way its Boeing office was set up
by Ali Bahrami, with only a few peo-
ple assigned to flight controls. “There
are forty-four thousand people in the
F.A.A.,” the engineer said. “But we don’t