March 10, 2019—for 157 families, the day is forever etched in their minds. It marked the crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, headed to Nairobi, Kenya. It was the second crash of the same new aircraft type in less than five months. The first, a Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX 8, crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 189 aboard in October 2018.
As Boeing became preoccupied with blaming the “foreign” pilots, its executives likely never thought the faulty design of a new software system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), would be discovered. The company had carefully hidden the existence of MCAS from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to save money on simulator training of pilots worldwide, a pricey undertaking, perhaps in dollars, but at the cost of 346 lives. Ultimately, the entire fleet was grounded worldwide in the longest grounding of an aircraft—nearly two years—while Boeing frantically tried to find a fix in order to continue filling Boeing 737 MAX 8 orders for the airlines.
Following numerous congressional hearings and tanking stock prices, the crashes led to the departure of Boeing’s CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, only to be replaced by another corporate insider, David Calhoun, who, after four years, announced his early retirement at the end of 2024 but not before the debacle of a MAX 9 aircraft involving part of a plane’s fuselage, a door panel, flying off shortly after takeoff. Lives were spared only because the plane was at a comparatively low altitude of 16,000 feet. Had the blowout occurred just two minutes later in flight, this story would have had an entirely different ending.
In an attempt to reverse a trend of outsourcing parts manufacturing, Boeing reportedly is in talks with the maker of those door plugs, Spirit AeroSystems of Kansas, to buy back the entire company, a company it had spun off nearly 20 years ago. But on March 29, 2024, the Texas Attorney General announced his office is investigating that parts supplier, ordering Spirit AeroSystems to turn over documents related to manufacturing defects that led to the grounding of dozens of Boeing MAX 9 planes as well as documentation concerning the company’s decision to fire whistleblower Joshua Dean after he reported the defects.
In March 2024, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan wrote an article, “America Has a Resilience Problem,” for Foreign Policy magazine1, citing Boeing as an example of a once-great American corporation hollowed out by monopoly when it eliminated its only domestic commercial aerospace competitor McDonnell Douglas in 1997. She wrote, “Worse quality is one of the harms that most economists expect from monopolization because firms that face little competition have limited incentive to improve their products. …Reporting suggests that Boeing executives began to view their knowledgeable workforce as a cost, not an asset, with tragic outcomes.”
The FAA uncovered dozens of quality control issues at Boeing that same month, according to The New York Times2. Following an audit in February, the FAA reportedly gave Boeing 90 days to develop a plan for quality control improvements. The New York Times wrote that many of the problems fell under the categories of failure to follow "approved manufacturing processes" and “failure to keep proper quality control documentation.”
In the years before Boeing bought out McDonnell Douglas, the airline’s catchphrase was, “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going.” Now TikTok users have turned that saying into satire stemming from the real fears involving the safety of those planes, as Calhoun—who committed himself to fixing the issues—bails. Social media users are posting videos with commentary like, “Flying on the Boeing 737 MAX…wish us luck,” “How to avoid flying on a Boeing MAX for your future flights” and “Never flying the 737 MAX again. Scariest flight ever.” A juxtaposition of Boeing’s popular slogan of the 1980s with one commentator joking that Boeing’s new motto is, “When one door closes, another one opens.”
Boeing’s top executive stepping down this year is the tip of the iceberg in a broader shakeup of the airplane manufacturer’s top leadership announced on March 25, 2024. It is disappointing that it took a door panel coming off in midair of the MAX 9 for Calhoun to exit. He told the press that the Alaska Airlines door incident flying off in January was a “watershed moment.” That statement strikes at the very hearts of those who lost loved ones in two fatal crashes five years before.
Two Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes crashed within five months while Calhoun sat as Chair of Boeing’s Board of Directors, yet it takes the sloppy design of a different aircraft—grounded in greed—to prompt him to want to leave the company early. Boeing’s Board of Directors even changed company bylaws in 2021 to accommodate Calhoun by extending the initial mandatory retirement age of 65 to 70. Calhoun is now 66, with plans originally set to retire in 2028. The “watershed moment” for him should have been when nearly 400 people died in the Boeing 737 MAX 8 disaster years ago. If taken seriously back then, it is likely that the Alaska Air debacle could have been averted, and the company would be on the way to healing itself and ensuring the flying public's safety. The victims’ families knew that the culture of profit over safety would not change when Calhoun took over in January 2020 because he was raised on that principle.
It also was announced that effective immediately in March 2024, the CEO of the commercial airline unit that oversees the production of the Boeing 737 MAX 8, Stan Deal, is leaving to be replaced by Boeing’s chief operating officer, an MBA grad and not an engineer, Stephanie Pope. Boeing Chairman of the Board Larry Kellner also is stepping down. He will be succeeded as chair by Steve Mollenkopf, who has been a Boeing director since 2020 and will lead the board in picking a new CEO, Boeing announced.
The Boeing C-suite exodus is only the beginning. Those who lost the most—the families of the victims of the Boeing crashes—believe the company requires a complete cleanout. Competent individuals who prioritize safety must be at the helm of the 108-year-old company to convey to the entire industry its commitment to producing safe aircraft. All Boeing workers must take pride in what they are doing with the lives of every passenger in their hands. That isn’t the case right now, as dozens of whistleblowers and previous employees have complained. Boeing must come to terms with the fact that the MAX aircraft must be completely re-certified. Boeing engineers must work on the latest state-of-the-art design of a new aircraft instead of retooling a plane that has been in the air for 50 years for the purpose that the FAA conducts less scrutiny.
There are simply too many issues with the MAX, as documented in a 2022 award-winning film, “Boeing’s Fatal Flaw.” PBS and The New York Times updated the documentary in March 2024 to cover all that has happened within Boeing over the last two years.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is considering whether the conduct of Boeing officials that led to the door mishap of the MAX 9 rises to the level of criminal misconduct. The FBI is currently investigating the circumstances surrounding the near disaster. Meanwhile, in a separate courtroom in Texas, a federal judge is deciding whether a previous DOJ agreement regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashes—an agreement where family members were excluded—should be overturned because they were improperly left out of the process.
As the DOJ announced in January 2021, shortly before President Biden took office, “(Boeing) has entered into an agreement with the Department of Justice to resolve a criminal charge related to a conspiracy to defraud the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aircraft Evaluation Group (FAA AEG) in connection with the FAA AEG’s evaluation of Boeing’s 737 MAX airplane.” Under the terms of the deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ, “Boeing will pay a total criminal monetary amount of over $2.5 billion, composed of a criminal monetary penalty of $243.6 million, compensation payments to Boeing’s 737 MAX airline customers of $1.77 billion and the establishment of a $500 million crash-victim beneficiaries fund to compensate the heirs, relatives and legal beneficiaries of the 346 passengers who died in the Boeing 737 MAX crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302,” according to a DOJ press release3.
Evidently, Boeing doesn't view the 737 MAX issues as problems as long as it can throw money at them in an attempt to make them go away. But as its stock price plummets to all-time lows, many families of the crash in Ethiopia wait for justice in another courtroom in Chicago. Their civil cases, if not settled, will have their say before a jury of their peers to determine the worth of the lives of their loved ones. It is a difficult decision, but bringing back those victims just isn’t possible, and Boeing knew that even after the first crash when it studied the MAX 8 and found that the fleet would suffer 15 crashes if changes weren’t made. That is one every other year. As the Frontline documentary reported, Boeing gambled it could fix the MCAS system before the second crash. It gambled wrong. And 157 lives and their families paid the ultimate price.
1. Khan, Lina M. "America Has a Resilience Problem." Foreign Policy, 20 Mar. 2024, foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/20/lina-khan-ftc-trade-united-states-economy-tech-monopoly-national-security-boeing/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2024.
2. Walker, Mark. "F.A.A. Audit of Boeing's 737 MAX Production Found Dozens of Issues." The New York Times, 11 Mar. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/us/politics/faa-audit-boeing-737-MAX.html. Accessed 3 Apr. 2024.
3. Office of Public Affairs. "Boeing Charged with 737 MAX Fraud Conspiracy and Agrees to Pay over $2.5 Billion." U.S. Department of Justice, 7 Jan. 2001, www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-MAX-fraud-conspiracy-and-agrees-pay-over-25-billion. Accessed 3 Apr. 2024.
