have enough people to spend four hours
to evaluate the MCAS safety assessment?”
The New York Times reported that
Boeing had offered a safety feature to
alert pilots to a faulty angle-of-attack
sensor, but charged extra for it; neither
of the doomed planes had this equip-
ment. The Wall Street Journal reported
that Boeing’s assumption in designing
MCAS was that, in the event of a mal-
function, pilots would be able to re-
spond properly within four seconds.
Taken together, the reports suggested
that Boeing had put all the risk on the
pilot, who would be expected to know
what to do within seconds if a system
he didn’t know existed set off a welter
of cockpit alerts and forced the plane
downward. “An airplane shouldn’t put
itself in a position where the pilots have
to act heroically to save the plane,” the
veteran U.S. commercial-airline pilot
told me. “Pilots shouldn’t have to be
superhuman. Planes are built to be
flown by normal people.” Gregory Tra-
vis, the pilot and software engineer,
said, “MCAS sealed their fate. Every-
thing that comes after that is noise.”
Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who,
in 2009, saved a plane by crash-land-
ing it in the Hudson River, testified at
a House hearing in June. “Boeing has
said that they did not categorize a fail-
ure of MCAS as more critical because
they assumed that pilot action would
be the safeguard,” he said. This was a
mistake. “I can tell you first hand that
the startle factor is real and it’s huge—
it absolutely interferes with one’s abil-
ity to quickly analyze the crisis and take
effective action.” He said that he, too,
had struggled in a 737 MAX simulator
after the crashes. “Even knowing what
was going to happen, I could see how
crews could have run out of time be-
fore they could have solved the prob-
lems,” he said. MCAS, he concluded,
“was fatally flawed and should never
have been approved.”
A recent battery of reports has con-
firmed this assessment. In September,
the N.T.S.B. issued its first report on
the 737 MAX, declaring that Boeing un-
derestimated the cockpit chaos thatwould result from an MCAS malfunc-
tion and the effect this would have on
a pilot’s ability to react quickly. A re-
port by a task force made up of U.S. and
international regulators concluded that
Boeing’s engineering representatives
faced “undue pressure.” The Indonesian
government’s final report on the Lion
Air crash cited, among other factors,
Boeing’s failure to mention MCAS in
the 737 MAX manual—the cockpit re-
corder captured the sound of the pilots
riffling through pages in vain.
Currently, about seven hundred 737
MAX planes have been grounded or are
awaiting delivery, and it seems likely
that the plane’s return will stretch well
into 2020. The F.A.A.’s European coun-
terpart has made plain that it now has
so little faith in Boeing and the F.A.A.’s
ability to regulate the planes that it
might take the unprecedented step of
withholding approval even after the
F.A.A. signs off.
The grounding has cost airlines some
four billion dollars—Southwest Air-
lines, which has purchased more 737
MAX by far than any other airline, has
cancelled thousands of flights, leading
its pilots’ union to sue Boeing for lost
pay. Boeing estimates the total loss to
the company at nine billion dollars and
rising. Its stock is down fifteen per cent
since the Ethiopian crash, erasing thirty-
four billion dollars in value and prompt-
ing a shareholder lawsuit.
The company has belatedly signalled
that it recognizes that its corporate evo-
lution in the past couple of decades played
a role in the disaster. In September, an
internal committee recommended that
top engineers report to the commer-
cial-airplane division’s chief engineer—
in theory, a reassertion of expertise against
the bottom-line mind-set that Stan
Sorscher and others deplored. Soon af-
terward, Boeing replaced the head of its
commercial-airplane division, and its
board of directors stripped Muilenburg
of his title as the company’s chairman.
In late October, Muilenburg testified
before two congressional committees,
where he was challenged in light of a
litany of new revelations. In 2015, a Boe-
ing employee had asked in an e-mail,
“Are we vulnerable to single AOA sen-
sor failures with the MCAS implemen-
tation?” The following year, the chief
technical pilot for the 737 MAX told a