THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019 57
The next day, the same plane, with
a hundred and eighty-one passengers
and a new crew, took off from Jakarta.
Almost immediately, the control col-
umn began shaking violently, a warn-
ing that the plane gives when it’s at risk
of stalling. About three minutes into
the flight, the automated controls kicked
in, and the plane dropped seven hun-
dred feet. The pilot, Bhavye Suneja, and
his co-pilot, Harvino, repeatedly tried
to lift the nose by holding down the
switch that adjusted the stabilizer on
the tail of the plane, but after ten sec-
onds the automated controls kicked in
again, driving the nose back down. They
pulled frantically on the control col-
umn, but, twelve minutes into the flight,
the plane dropped five thousand feet at
four hundred and fifty miles per hour,
into the Java Sea.
Boeing had conceived the 737 MAX
in 2011. That spring, American Airlines
told Boeing that it was on the verge of
abandoning the older model of the 737,
which had débuted in 1967 and under-
gone multiple updates, for Airbus’s
A320neo, which was more fuel-efficient.
Boeing had been considering building
an entirely new jet, but it could take a
decade to design a new plane and get
it through the full F.A.A. certification
process. Airlines would also be required
to train their crews on the new planes.
Desperate to retain American, Boeing
chose instead to overhaul the 737.
Updating the plane introduced some
engineering difficulties. The new model
had larger engines, and it was hard to
find room for them on the low-slung
- Boeing decided to place the engines
farther forward, just in front of the wing.
The new position, and the greater thrust
of the engines, produced an aerody-
namic challenge during a maneuver
called a windup turn—a steep, banked
spiral that brings a plane to the point
of stall, which is required for safety tests,
though it’s rarely used in typical flying.
“On most airplanes, as you approach
stall you can feel it,” a veteran pilot for
a U.S. commercial carrier told me. In-
stead of the steadily increasing force on
the control column that pilots were used
to feeling—and that F.A.A. guidelines
required—the new engines caused a
loosening sensation.
To correct this, Boeing settled on a
software feature called the Maneuver-
ing Characteristics Augmentation Sys-
tem. As the nose of the jet approached
a high angle, suggesting an oncoming
stall, MCAS would adjust the stabilizer
on the plane’s tail, pushing the nose
down, to alleviate the slackness in the
control column. “They were trying to
make it feel the same, so the pilots
wouldn’t require training,” the pilot said.
Boeing had gone so far as to promise
to pay Southwest Airlines, which flies
737s almost exclusively, a million dol-
lars per plane if training on a simula-
tor was found to be necessary.
Boeing considered the MCAS feature
to be so minor that it removed men-
tion of it from the 737 MAX’s pilot man-
ual. This meant that the Lion Air pi-
lots had no idea why their plane kept
forcing itself downward: an angle-of-
attack sensor on the jet’s nose had mal-
functioned, mistakenly signalling that
the plane was nearing a stall and lead-
ing MCAS to continually push the nose
down—twenty-one times in all.
Nine days after the Lion Air crash,
the F.A.A. issued an “airworthiness
directive,” requiring an update of the
737 MAX’s flight-operations manual.
Boeing instructed pilots to deal with
excessive downward pitching by fol-
lowing the procedure for “runaway
trim”—the term for when the system
that controls the angle of the stabi-
lizer malfunctions. The F.A.A. agreed
that this notice would suffice whileBoeing came up with a software fix
for MCAS, which it indicated would
take about six weeks.
But Boeing seemed to believe that
pilot error had caused the crash. In its
response to an initial Indonesian gov-
ernment report, it highlighted the con-
trasting reactions of the crew on the
doomed flight and the crew the day be-
fore, saying that the pilots on the sec-
ond day had not followed the standard
“runaway trim” procedures.
One of Boeing’s senior executivesfor sales in Southeast Asia at the time
of the crash told me that, at the com-
pany, the word was that the crash had
been caused by pilot error. Sales for the
737 MAX remained strong, and none of
his customers were asking him about
pilot training to address MCAS. “There
was nothing I was concerned about at
that point in time,” he said. “The stock
was holding up O.K.”
On December 17th, less than two
months after the Lion Air crash, Boe-
ing’s board of directors approved a
twenty-per-cent increase in the com-
pany dividend and a twenty-billion-dol-
lar stock-repurchase program, allowing
Muilenburg, who had replaced McNer-
ney as C.E.O. in 2015, to carry out even
larger buybacks than in previous years.
The board also awarded Muilenburg a
thirteen-million-dollar bonus.O
n March 10th, in the early hours
of the morning, Nadia Milleron
was at the farmhouse taking care of Tor,
who had a stomach virus. She turned
on BBC Radio, and heard that there
had been an airplane crash in Ethiopia.
Samya’s boyfriend, Mike Snavely,
was on the night shift at a San Fran-
cisco hospital, where he was doing his
residency. He got a news alert on his
phone. Adnaan, Samya’s older brother,
was in New Zealand, working construc-
tion, his latest stop in a young adult-
hood that had included hitchhiking to
Alaska and sailing across the Atlantic
in a thirty-six-foot boat.
The three of them rushed to find
which flight Samya was on. Only after
they reached Samya’s boss at Think-
Well did Nadia wake Michael. “These
things always happened to other peo-
ple,” Michael told me. “I thought, That
can’t be, and found out that it was.”
Three days later, Ralph Nader ap-
peared on “Democracy Now,” the pro-
gressive news program. Nader, who is
eighty-five years old, talked about all
the good that Samya would have done
for the world. “It was her first trip under
her new job to Africa,” he said. “Very
enthusiastic. And she got to Addis Ababa
and boarded this”—he paused—“killer
plane, the MAX, 737 MAX 8.”
In Seattle, Stan Sorscher got a text
from Michael, who was writing to let
the board of the Coalition for a Pros-
perous America know that he would