👇🏾 🕣 ♥️ Crash course: How the Boeing management revolution spawned the 737 MAX disaster 🦋 🤜🏽 😅

There are already materials on Habré, delving into some technical aspects of the crash of the last Boeing aircraft. This dramatic article tells what led to these crashes.

^{Photo: Getty}

Almost two decades before the Boeing MCAS system destroyed two new 737 MAX aircraft, Stan Sorsher knew that the increasingly toxic environment in his company would lead to some sort of disaster. The "safety culture", which has long been a matter of pride, was rapidly supplanted, in his words, by "a culture of financial garbage, a culture of group thinking."

Sorsher, a physicist who has worked at Boeing for more than two decades and led negotiations there to form a union of engineers, has become obsessed with a management culture. He said he had no idea that the bold new management caste of Boeing would create such a stupid and blatantly obvious problem as the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System; a system for improving maneuvering performance, as a handful of software developers called it). Basically, he was worried that a decrease in market share would reduce sales and the number of employees, that is, what keeps post-industrial American union leaders from sleeping at night. To some extent, however, he foresaw all of this; he even showed how the losses from the ban on flights overlap short-term savings from outsourcing in one of his reports that no one readback in 2002.

In the early 2000s, Sorsher tried to preserve the company's worthy engineering heritage. He had mountains of facts in support of his position, mainly obtained from Boeing's acquisition of McDonnell Douglas in 1997 - a dysfunctionalfirms with an outdated Long Beach aircraft factory and a CEO who liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” when working with engineers: hire them for a few months when the project was nearing completion and fire them when it was time to keep the numbers down. In 2000, Boeing engineers staged a 40-day strike over the aftermath of the McDonnell deal; although they have made significant material concessions on the part of the leadership, they lost the cultural war. They also inherited a deliberately dysfunctional product line from McDonnell market gurus who loved cutting corners.

And while Boeing engineers worked hard to launch lemon planes into the skyMcDonnell, their own hopes of developing a new aircraft that could compete with Airbus, Boeing's only rival in the global market, faded. Influenced by all the critics who shouted about the recklessness of the deal with McDonnell, the board took a tough stance on new ambitious aircraft: "never again." Boeing executives began pouring "crocodile tears" about the cost of developing the 777 1995 model, Sorsher argued, although some industry insiders estimateher as the most cost-effective aircraft of all time. The premise for such complaints was stupid, Sorsher argued in PowerPoint presentations and in the study of this topic in the style of the Harvard Business School. Returning to a culture of an integrated approach to problem solving and the managerial structure of the past, he told everyone who listened again and again, was the only sensible way to create market value. But when he spoke with this message, he rarely caused anything other than rolling his eyes. “I disagree” was the usual answer. Sometimes, however, someone in the audience was frankly rude, like a Wall Street analyst who interrupted him in the middle of a sentence:

“Listen, I understand. You mean your business is different . What are you special about . Well, listen:everyone believes that his business is different because everyone is the same. None. Not. It’s different . ”

And indeed, this seems to be the true essence of this story: aircraft manufacturing is no different from mortgages or the distribution of insulin or dummy software for blood analysis - another cash cow for “one percent”, designed for inevitable slaughter. In the now notorious fiasco of the Boeing 737 MAX, the company released an airplane with hackware programmed to cancel all pilots and dive down when a small weather vane on the side of the fuselage informed him that his nose was bulging up. The weather vane was also not very reliable.; possibly due to misses on the assembly line, which became known from the reports of the informant . And when the plane processed the received incorrect data, he immediately dived into the sea.

Now more than ever it is clear that capitalism leads to such a hack, especially where computer software meets careless regulators. AIG once told investors that management could hardly imagine “any meaningful scenario in which we lose at least one dollar in any of these transactions,” which resulted in the company losing more than $ 100 billion a few months later - but algorithms risk management were erroneous . A couple of years later, one JP Morgan trader lost $ 6 billion., because someone programmed one of the cells in the bank’s risk management table by dividing two numbers by their sum, and not by their average value. Boeing, of course, was not a hedge fund: it was much better - stocks that have more than doubled since Trump’s inauguration, even ahead of Dow, 22 months before Lion Air’s 610 flight rushed into the Java Sea.

And so there was something alarmingly familiar when the world first learned about MCAS in November, about two weeks after the unimaginable stupidity of the system led a two-month plane and all 189 people on it to a terrible death. It looked like a mistake that a 23-year-old intern could make. Indeed, most of the MAX software was developed by recent graduates of Indian programming academies who earned even $ 9 per hour , which was part of the endless war of Boeing’s leadership with unions that once represented more than half of its employees. From a non-union Boeing assembly plant that opened in South Carolina in 2011, streams flowed for many yearsreports of informers about violations and claims of wrongful dismissals, accompanied by cases of regular falsification of quality control documents, sabotage of employees to ensure compliance with standards, as well as regular deliveries to airlines of aircraft with loose bolts, scratched windows and all kinds of scattered debris. The crash of the MCAS aircraft was just a new episode in the series, so thoroughly rooted in business news, that the nasty financial blog Naked Capitalism headlined its first MCAS post , Boeing, Crapification and the Lion Air Crash.

But not everyone looked at the wreck with such a cloudy look; it was still the first suicide aircraft in the world. The pilots were especially struck because MCAS was a big secret: for the most part hidden from Boeing's own test pilots ; mentioned only once in the glossary of a 1,600-page airplane manual; completely excluded from the 56-minute retraining course for the iPad, which some pilots with 737 certificates passed to receive the MAX certificate; and last minute remotefrom the Emergency Airworthiness Directive of November 7, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) two weeks after the crash of a Lion Air flight, supposedly to “remind” pilots of the protocol for responding to “spontaneous shifting of the stabilizer”. Most pilots first heard about MCAS from their unions, who in turn learned about the software from an additional bulletin that Boeing sent to airlines in addition to the Airworthiness Directive. Outraged, they went to forums, and some phoned aerospace veteran journalists like Dominic Gates from The Seattle Times , Andy Pashtor from The Wall Street Journal and Sean Broderick from Aviation Weekwho, in turn, interviewed no less shocked engineers. Other pilots, like Bernd Kai von Hosslin, an Ethiopian Airlines trainer, asked their corporate leadership to provide more resources to train people in new, frightening airplanes - just a few weeks before von Hosslin's carrier suffered its own massive tragedy with MAX .

Of course, the MCAS situation was an honest mistake, but the secrecy surrounding the very existence of the program suggested that it was not 100% honesthonest mistake. The history of secrecy begins with the universally beloved, extraordinarily friendly to employees, surprisingly glorious Southwest Airlines. (When the beloved co-founder of the airline, Herb Kelleher, died in January, Ralph Nader, an American lawyer and political activist, wrote a fiery obituary about an old friend, "many adored man" who founded his favorite airline; soon Nader will lose his granddaughter due to MCAS ). In 1971, Boeing gave Kelleher a pleasant favor by providing the first four 737 aircraft without prepayment, and Kelleher repaid them by buying more than a thousand 737 aircraft over the next 50 years - and not a single other aircraft. According to a recent lawsuitagainst Southwest and Boeing, the airline encouraged this loyalty with an unwritten but zealously executed agreement from the 90s that Boeing would not sell aircraft cheaper than Southwest pays, or that Boeing would send Southwest a refund check. And in exchange for this guarantee, Southwest uninterruptedly gave large orders and / or expedited payment after incidents, lowering stock prices, or both. The same lawsuit claims that after the September 11 tragedy, the airline formed an off-balance sheet fund to assist Boeing during unforeseen difficulties and provided its own aircraft to other airlines when Boeing production was delayed, while patiently waiting for the execution of its orders at a time convenient for Boeing. As carriers become more profitable in the 21st century,more and more of them followed Southwest's lead and helped Boeing achieve performance; United Airlines and Alaska Airlines in the fourth quarter of 2015, along with Southwest, made payments thatshould not have been produced before 2016. Such partnerships were just one of the numbers-smoothing mechanisms in the diversified toolbox that Boeing had created over the previous generation to make its complex and unstable business more acceptable to Wall Street. And although it was not completely kosher and by no means sustainable, it was by far the least destructive tool in the set - until Southwest asked Boeing about its orders for MAX.

Southwest expressed a lot of things about the alleged modifications to the 737; Kelleher's team basically wanted as few technical modifications as possible. With MAX, they raised the bar: according to Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing employee, Boeing agreed to compensateSouthwest a million dollars for every MAX bought if the FAA requires retraining the carrier’s pilots on a D-level simulator.

To those who agreed to this, the discount probably seemed to be the predictably extravagant demand of the airline, which extravagantly preferred to use only one model of the aircraft - exclusively and forever - while every other airline used ten models. Simulation training for 9,000 Southwest pilots would be a challenge, but hardly ruinous; industry analyst Keith Darby said it would cost about $ 2,000 per person. In addition, this was unlikely: the FAA had three retraining levels that would not necessarily require simulators. But the indication "No simulations" haunteda program; in fact, it required that any changes that were significant enough for designers to be hidden, masked or displayed in a footnote that would be removed from the final version of MAX. And this was difficult, because for all other airlines buying MAX, the argument in favor of the purchase was a significant difference from the latest generation 737: unprecedented fuel economy along with the new Airbus A320neo.

MAX and Neo gained their fuel efficiency thanks to the same component: CFM's massive LEAP engines, a joint venture between GE and the French Safran conglomerate. The engine fans were 20 inches or a little more than 40% larger in diameter than the 737 Pratt & Whitneys engines, and the engines themselves weighed about 6.120 pounds (2.776 kg), which is about two times heavier than the previous engines. Aircraft were also much longer, heavier and had a wider wingspan. But here is that without changing the design of the chassis and the need to re-pass the FAA certification it was impossible - to make them higher, and that was a problem. The engines were too large to fit in their original place under the wings, so the engineers installedthem a little forward, right in front of the wings.

This change led to such a shift in the center of gravity of the aircraft that it raised concerns even at the testing stage in the wind tunnel when the MAX was an eagle- sized model . The model was constantly severing individual marginal maneuvers, because the new aerodynamic profile of the aircraft pulled its tail down and forced its nose to rise up. Therefore, engineers developed a software patch called MCAS, which lowered its nose under strange circumstances in conjunction with the “automatic trim” system that Boeing created in the 1980s for smooth take-offs. However, after the 737 MAX was realized in about four years, test pilots discoverednew conditions in which the aircraft was more prone to stall than its predecessors. So Boeing remade MCAS to lower its nose whenever the angle-of-attack (AOA) sensor detects stall regardless of speed. This required the granting of additional powers to the system and the removal of safeguards, but in no way formally or realistically led to the changes requiring the approval of the FAA, which could have doubts about two significant features of the modified system. Firstly, the 737 has two angle of attack sensors, but only one, in a fatal way, has been programmed to activate MCAS. Former Boeing Ludtke engineer and anonymous informant polled by 60 Minutes Australia, gave this a simple explanation : Any program that is configured to process data from both sensors would have to take into account the likelihood that the sensors may contradict each other and provide a way to reconcile ambiguous data. Whatever this method, it would involve some kind of warning to the crew, which, in turn, would require additional training - perhaps not at level “D”, but no one wanted to risk it. Therefore, the system was programmed to lower the nose down when signaling from a single (and to some extent flimsy ) sensor. And for still unknown and truly mysterious reasons, it was programmed to relowering of the nose after five seconds, and after another five seconds, and again, and again, and again, and again to literally nausea.

And then, to make it all right, the Boeing technical pilot sent a letter to the FAA , where he casually asked to remove the mention of this software from the instructions for the pilots.

Thus, no more than a handful of people in the world knew about the existence of MCAS before it became notorious. Thus, a generation after the start of Boeing’s transition to “ financialization ””, It became a completely predictable result of the process during which investment capital is completely abstracted from the fundamental principles of production and control: a flight correction system, essentially made on the knee in order to crash the plane. “If you need an example of late-stage capitalism, or whatever it is called,” said Richard Abulafia, a long-term consultant for the aerospace industry, “this one is pretty good.”

The 737 MAX passed flight tests for FAA certification in just over a year. The plane even outstripped the schedule, which from the point of view of investors was not bad, as the previous new Boeing, 787, was delayed for three years . Of course, the MAX was not really a new aircraft, but simply an “upgrade” of the old 737, which compared to the original 737-100allowed in its different versions to carry roughly two and a half times more passengers about three times further.

In the early stages, the fatal crash of Lion Air's 610 flight fit too much into the battered stereotypes of Indonesian safety standards to look, at least for laymen, something more significant than the warning story about a honeymoon in Bali. It so happened that this MAX on another flight just before the crash had already begun to dive after takeoff. The pilots picked it up, but it dived again and again, so the pilots manually flew all the way to Jakarta, where the passenger told television reporters that everyone on board spent the entire flight, “ reading every prayer"That they knew. But all that the pilots noted in the scheduled maintenance log is that the aircraft’s speed control system “went in the wrong direction” and that the speed and altitude sensors were turned off. “But nothing about how, by the way, the demons shod the plane ?” - joked Abulafia.

And so all of the initial crash assessments were dedicated to Indonesia's tarnished aviation security history and Lion Air’s even less outstanding reputation. The plane plunged into the Java Sea in the early hours of Monday, 14 hours before the market opened, and lowered Boeing shares by almost $ 30. But the price recovered on Tuesday. “It was like an anomaly,” said David Calhoun, private asset manager who heads the boarddirectors of Boeing and whose share in the company between the two disasters 737 MAX rose in price by $ 2 million

Of course, there is not a single pilot on the Boeing board, and the only engineer among the directors is CEO Dennis Mülenburg. And only the pilots and engineers considered the crash alarming. “In Boeing, you just have to say“ 427 ”or“ 981, ”and everyone immediately understands what you mean,” said Sorsher. Preliminary satellite data showed that the nose of the aircraft dived immediately after takeoff, then returned, and then again dived and returned again, and then again dived, and again, and again. This was not the usual flight path of a pilot who lost control of the aircraft. Twenty-two times, the demons frantically pulled their nose down and twenty-two times the pilot straightened the plane with equal force. “I'm so angry at Boeing’s attempts to tarnish this captain when he was actually the most skilled pilot among them all,” said Bjorn Ferm, a former Swedish Air Force pilot,whose technical blog is on the aviation siteLeeham News is required reading on the 737 MAX. “He coped with this wild monster - 22 jerks, and he held it in his hands!”

That it was for the wild monster who constantly threw the nose down? In the first episode of the five-part series of 1996 PBS on the creation of 777, the first Boeing aircraft with EMDS technology (approx. Transl .: electronic control system; English: fly-by-wire ; literally: “flight by wire”), the engineer talks about philosophy companies in the field of pilot automation support:

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Pilots are familiar with this philosophy. This is one of the things that distinguishes Boeing piloting from Airbus piloting. When updating the 737th model in 1997, Southwest asked Boeing to make special changes to the design of the cockpit, as it was more convenient for carrier pilots to use analog indicators. The Lion Air pilot was sure that he could turn off what his plane was trying to crash, so he temporarily transferred control to his co-pilot and began to check the instructions. Ninety seconds later, everyone was dead. The co-pilot, Ferm said, "wasn’t ready for the wild monster MCAS."

Four months later, the monster hit again; as a result of the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 near Addis Ababa, another 157 people were killed in almost the same circumstances as in the Lion Air flight crash. Now the death toll on Boeing MAX flights has reached 346, and as soon as the scale of the horror became completely clear, the FAA stopped the MAX flights , initially intending to return them to operation within a few weeks. Weeks turned into months and the resumption of flights can ultimately happen only next year. What has risen since the initial fall was the price of Boeing shares, which at the time of the publication of the article The New Republic was about the same level as a year ago, despite the company's forecasts of payments of about$ 8 billion to settle claims for compensation for deaths due to MAX crash. Boeing’s real financial losses could be much higher if a larger number of airlines follow the example of the Russian state concern Rostec, whose leasing division filed a lawsuit against Boeing in August demanding that they cancel orders for the plane and return the advance payment with interest. This may prompt pessimistic credit rating agencies to lowerA rating of Boeing’s obligations, which could lead to a serious financial crisis. But until something very, very catastrophic happens, investors seem ready to buy back all the drops in Boeing shares - like MCAS, but vice versa. This is not least because they know that the company has developed fault-tolerant systems to smooth out revenue, meet expectations and push demand for their stocks with clarity comparable to liners that left the Boeing assembly line at its peak.

^{An investigator from the U.S. National Transportation and Security Council (NTSB) inspects the wreckage at the crash site of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 302 on March 12, 2019 in Bishoft, Ethiopia. (Jemal Countess / Getty)}

We can say that all these people were killed by a fatal constructive defect, but in reality this is just another way of saying that money made it. It's hard to correlate the Boeing that created this wild monster with the hero company of the impressive PBS series. In the early 90s, when the economic downturn was a constant source of anxiety for Boeing managers, the company nonetheless mobilized $ 5 billion and 10,000 employees - 5,000 engineers and 5,000 mechanics - divided by several dozens of engineering and technical practices in Japan collectives - to develop the 777 model. And about 2 to 3 billion dollars were allocated for the creation of 737 MAX during the period of the lowest interest rates and record profits of airlines .

One definitive harbinger of what Boeing expected was the saga about GE90 - a new super-efficient engine based on the NASA project, which was developed by General Electric Aviation Chief Brian Row specifically for 777. Market observers called the development of jet engines, which make up 20 percent of the sale price of the aircraft, GE's “crown jewel," because after ten-digit development and testing costs, the margin was high. But in 1993, the notorious GE CEO Jack Welch, a lover of layoffs, already firmly moving towards becoming the most incredibly acclaimed character in American business, fired Rowe along with several thousand other aviation engineers. The results were predictable: engines failed trials - often in spectacular extravaganza,teeming with smoke and flame - again and again. The situation worsened to such an extent that the FAA sent Boeing “suspension notice ”directing companies to stop flight testing until GE pulls itself together. The reduced staff of engineers working overtime to implement the decisions of their long-laid-off colleagues finally managed to coordinate the engines more than a year later than the planned delivery dates, and the engines continued to suffer malfunctions for many more years.

Less than two years later, Welch’s short-cut protege named Harry Stonesifer, a former CEO of McDonnell Douglas, seized the reins in Boeing, and the same dysfunction came to Seattle.

Stonesifer was said to have "bought a Boeing with Boeing money." Indeed, Boeing ultimately received little from the $ 13 billion paid for McDonnell Douglas, which was on the verge of several years beforeruin. But the McDonnell board loved Stonesifer for arranging the ransom of McDonnell, and the Boeing board also loved him. To a large extent, this was because Stonesifer positioned himself as the savior of Boeing and knew how to use an unfavorable situation to achieve his goal. When he arrived in Seattle, the production was in chaos due to the combination of a new bulky computer system, a sudden surge in orders and untrained new personnel hired to fulfill them. Production managers urged Stonesifer to mobilize resources to rectify the situation, but he ignored them until things got so bad that they had to stop the assembly lines - and at that moment he started what The Seattle Times called the “ cultural revolution ”.

The first decree of a new era, consistent with the traditions of Maoism, banned the term "family"; it was introduced as an administrative requirement in a 1998 Boeing retreat. (This move was borrowed from Jack Welch, who despised the concept of “loyalty” among his subordinates). The word “ team " was a new idea to describe corporate interdependence .

The other great cultural transformation of Stonesifer was aimed at slandering and marginalizing engineers, as a class, and aircraft, as a business. He liked to say: "You can earn a lot of money from bankruptcy." Welch was known for translating senior executives every year from, say, the locomotive division into plastics, and from there to jet engines. Stonesifer wanted Boeing's top executives to perceive airplanes with the same cool detachment, so that the then CFO Debbie Hopkins explained in a 2000 interview with Bloomberg that “don't overly loop around the box” - that is, by plane.

No one at Boeing really knew what happened to them after the merger with McDonnell. Stan Sorsher was at a family gathering when he started stacking fragments together. He spoke (alright, spoken out) with his uncle Sidney, a delicate and vibrant man who admittedly had the brightest mind ever to emerge from Flint, Michigan, about the vicious new management culture that had taken over his company when Uncle Sidney cut off looked him directly in the eye, and, with the accuracy and clarity that Sorsher had ever seen only, "for example, at the Nobel Prize winners in physics," he told his nephew:

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Sidney Davidson was an innovator in accounting at the University of Chicago, who considered his profession, with the words from the name of one of the textbooks, as "the language of business." And although, as Sorsher knew, he was wrong about the production of aircraft, his uncomplicated analysis was attractive largely because Boeing Zero was absorbed in fashionable financial reporting standards of the day. The new model for measuring long-term profitability in corporate America has decisively erased the old criteria in the style of Warren Buffett, such as profit and operating profitability. Companies with traditional profitability were at a disadvantage - now companies that were not overly capitalized by technology startups tried to position their enterprises as a history of transformation.Boeing told her version of the story with another Stonesifer initiative, which skeptics have dubbed the “RONA cult” or the return on net assets.

Theoretically, the return on net assets, which GE called “residual profit”, is a quantitative assessment of how efficiently the company uses its factories, warehouses, office buildings, display cases and other elements of its physical enterprise. Theoretically, using this metric, it can be proved that it will be better for the company to close it and convert it into Amazon condominiums and warehouses, or that it would be better for the fighter aircraft plant and the fuel tanker plant to consolidate the production lines into one, or (depending from the year the company has been manufacturing aircraft) this plant can cost more than dead than alive. In fact, all that was needed to make RONA instantly take off, no matter what,- It is to sell your assets indiscriminately and outsource any functions previously performed by them to other strategic links in the supply chain.

McDonnell Douglas engineers have seen it all before: In the name of RONA, the Stonesifer team hammered the final nail into the coffin of the McDonnell commercial airliner business, trying to outsource everything except design, final assembly, flight testing and sales of the MD-11 . In 2001, one of McDonnell's engineers issued harsh criticism regarding this indicator and its inevitable result, Profits Outsourced, which was widely distributed on the Boeing internal network. But Wall Street analysts rejected this article as “idle talk,” and so the whole process was destined to erupt again at Stonesiffer in Boeing.

Buzzing with new ideas about which factories to sell and which components to outsource, Boeing was losing its market share in favor of Airbus, and even Jack Welch’s new protege on the board of directors, James McNerney, insisted on creating a new aircraft. Stonesifer and John McDonnell, who seemed to be plotting a Salieri-style project aimed at crashing a Boeing in a business that failed his own family business, put forward what Sorsher called a “medieval” ultimatum : to develop a new plane in less than 40 percent of the cost of developing a 777 model 13 years before, and assemble each aircraft for less than 60 percent of the unit cost of a Model 777 product in 2003. The Board of Directors ultimately approved the development budget, which, according to industry experts, amounted to $ 7 billion for the project, which at that time was designated 7E7 - and later 787. But this figure was accompanied by a bold asterisk, because managers promised the board that they would require subcontractors to cover most of the costs. As the former president of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Alan Mulally once explained to a Sorsher friend in a parking lot before quitting in 2006: “In the old days, you went to the board and asked for the amount of X, and in return they offered the amount of Y, and then you agreed on what that’s the amount, and with that you designed the plane. And in modern times you go to the board, and they say: “Here is the budget for this plane, and we will take this part for ourselves, and you get what is left; don’t screw it up. ”

It is difficult to convey the extent to which they messed up with the 787. Presented as a high-tech, extremely more efficient development of the 777, the aircraft was in all respects the opposite of its predecessor. It was released three years later than planned, costing tens of billions of dollars over budget and its flights were stopped 14 months after the first flight after a series of mysterious ignitions of lithium-ion batteries. This came as a surprise only because the batteries were the last thing anyone (with the exception of the Boeing battery team) saw a potential threat to 787 Dreamliner flights. (As for the experts in those batteries, that’s greatA 2014 Al-Jazeera English documentary telling how subcontractors entrusted with the production of Model 787 battery chargers struggled to cope with Boeing specifications and eventually burned an entire 10,000-square-foot factory in the worst chemical fire in Tucson’s history in Arizona).

The entire 787 project was absurdly understaffed from the very beginning, Peter Lemm, a former engineer on board control systems, recalled: “Literally, where there were 20 engineers, now there was one.” Boeing intentionally subcontracted the components without designing them. The program’s chief manager, Mike Beir, assured that when the parts are ready, they easily “ fit together ”"Like Lego. It was an unintentionally ridiculous turn compared to Project 777: the project managers of that plane wanted the plane to be as easy to assemble as Fisher-Price toys (Note: Fisher-Price toys do not require assembly). And unlike the 787, the 777 was executed with such precision that it was the first Boeing airliner that did not require the completion of inconsistencies on an expensive physical prototype aircraft. The first 777, descended from the assembly line, was suitable for flights.

In the case of the 787th, on the contrary, nothing matched. There was a gap between the deck and the fuselage; the wing did not fit well on the aircraft body. What was even more problematic, it turned out that most of the parts that Boeing had expected to “dock” —from the wings to the smoke detectors — had no piping or electrical wiring. Even the fuselage was an empty shell. As a result, the bulk of the real design of the aircraft took place on the assembly line, and Boeing had to write off three different mock-ups that were too much like scientific experiments in order to pass for flying aircraft. In the end, the Dream Liner was worth at least $ 30 billion, and probably closer to $ 50 billion. From 2004 to 2008, when the aircraft was supposed to enter the market, Boeing sent $ 16 billiondividends and stock repurchases, stopping only when the plane was officially late, although, as Sorsher recalled bitterly, “anyone could see that the plane would be late.”

In the usual context, it’s hard to imagine how the “Harry Stonesifer Approach” - already realized by James McNerney, a GE veteran with Harvard MBA, who initially persuaded the board to approve the aircraft - could have survived in such a traumatic, grandiose hellish spiral as the one in which due to 787 was Boeing. But the problems of the project appeared against the background of much more serious problems in the American economy, in 2008, during the same volatile spring on Wall Street, when they saved Bear Stearns. By the time test flights began to point to fundamental problems with aircraft design, 2009 came and America was inthe deepest recession since the 1930s. Investors, voters and regulators - all of them at that time were used to such things. So McNerney kept his job, eventually earning about $ 250 million in rewards to Boeing. One of his last actions, he resumed the company’s share buyback program six months after the FAA lifted the ban on the operation of 787 aircraft. Between 2013 and 2019, Boeing spent over $ 43 billion to buy back its own shares and another $ 17.4 billion. US on dividends.

Recent problems with MAX have also not affected the company's core financial position. Two months after the Lion Air disaster, the board of directors authorized the company to send another20 billion dollars to repurchase own shares. If you're wondering where they got such audacity, then, well, GE spent $ 24 billion on its own shares in 2016 and 2017 alone. Boeing’s board of directors is currently chaired by David Calhoun, another Jack Welch protege who has nothing but a Virginia Tech accounting undergraduate who, by the time he reached 49 years old, had four GE divisions — something like a real version of Jack Donaghi, reckless hire GE from 30 Rock showplayed by Alec Baldwin. Calhoun was a candidate for the CEO position in 2005 when McNerney got it, and he is the first candidate for this position when and if the board ultimately decides to remove Dennis Mühlenburg, a lifetime employee and engineer at Boeing, who now takes over the management of the company after fiasco with MAX. Answering a question from The Washington Post about why the company did not stop MAX flights when it first found out about the sinister software that killed 189 people, Calhoun calmly indignant insisted : “I do not regret this decision. And I don’t think that we were wrong at that time and in that place. ” Translation: It’s easier to lie about something when you don’t want to bother and delve into.

And indeed, basically Boeing’s response to MAX disastersconsisted in the dissemination of misinformation and doubts that made the disasters more complex than they actually were. At first, Boeing issued, and then authorized the FAA to distribute to the aviation community a brief instruction that essentially copies the instructions from the flight manual for the 737 model regarding spontaneous shifting of the stabilizer - a rare (but frightening and well-understood) situation in which the horizontal airplane stabilizer does not respond to team pilot. Then, when the airlines informed the pilots about MCAS, Boeing sent executives to reassure the pilots about the deadly software - explaining, in the words of Boeing vice president Mike Sinnet, to the American Airlines pilot union that Boeing simply did not want to “ overload ”crews with unnecessary information. ” Sinnett also said that MCAS pilots would never have crashed because the “Disagree” indicator (an indicator of discrepancy in the angle of attack data) is an additional feature that would have been paid extra for the installation of their planes on their American Airlines fleet before takeoff the crew that the data of the angle of attack sensors of the aircraft contradict each other, and that the aircraft is not suitable for operation.

This detail turned out to be a lie. (To activate the Disagree indicator, the plane had to be at least 400 feet high and at that point, pilots already on take-off would only have a few seconds to deploy the plane). But the idea of having some kind of protective function that would save American Airlines' planes fanned the fantasy that the crash due to MCAS could not have happened in a civilized country even if its pilots were poorly informed so as not to recall the protocol for responding to spontaneous relocation stabilizer.

And so in March 2019, Peter Lemm, a former Boeing on-board control systems engineer who runs a very technical aviation blog called Satcom Guru, I could not bring myself to believe that when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 drilled land near the resort town of Biesoft, this incident could be related to the Lion Air plane crash. It can't be MCAS, it just can't be, he thought. Lemm met his wife while working on a 757 and 767 pitch control system; he was also one of the company's now-slandered “authorized engineering representatives” to whom the FAA delegates mosttheir supervisory responsibilities. This contradicted everything that he had seen in 40 years in this area, to admit that two accidents with a difference of four months were caused by something so specific and stupid. When the FAA stopped MAX flights even before analyzing preliminary black box data, he opposed the move on Twitter. It was clear that Boeing made some serious mistakes, but it seemed implausible that the media were not too simple to represent them, and moreover, every pilot in the world knew how to respond to the MCAS error. They had a protocol!

But by the end of March, Lemm and his colleague, aviation blogger Bjorn Ferm, periodically working together with the anonymous but very famous Mentour Pilot, an examiner and 737 commander with half a millionYouTube subscribers have solved at least one puzzle: Ethiopian Airlines pilots followed the Boeing protocol. They turned the stabilizer electric motor switches to the off position and tried to rotate the nose of the aircraft back using manual control — they simply could not. In accordance with the prescribed procedure for correcting the alarm received by the on-board computer, the pilots flew fast - more than 265 mph, that is, at the speed at which the hand wheel became unbearableheavy. This problem was not specific to MAX; it was a well-known problem with 737 in general. Mentour Pilot noticed a problem in his day-to-day job of evaluating the final exams on the flight simulators of hundreds of potential 737 pilots. He even shot a terrifying video in which he tried to run the MCAS bypass protocol in the simulator to demonstrate a system crash. And as Lemm described in detail on his blog, the problem was aggravated by how Boeing changed or did not change the plane during various iterations: reducing the size of manual control wheels, adding local automation without switching to a fully electronic control system, an introduction to the 80s somewhat dubious function called " automatic trim”, Which paved the way for MCAS, the consolidation of some of the MAX controls, all at the same time removing a lot of the necessary information from the 737 official documentation over the years.

^{Rep. Angie Craig talks with Paul Njoroge (right) and Michael Stumo, both of whom lost family members in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, during a hearing at the House Transport and Infrastructure Committee Subcommittee. (Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Getty)}

The consequence was that Boeing not only equipped the MAX with deadly software, but also took an additional step, instructing the pilots to respond to erroneous activation of the software in a literal sense in an impossible way. On its own, the MCAS destroyed the Lion Air in twelve minutes; in the event of an Ethiopian flight crash, blocking the MCAS according to Boeing’s instructions reduced this time by half. For many years, Lemm observed a lot of stupid things from his former employer, but he found the whole mess "frankly deafening."

Lemm was close to publishing his analysis of the problem with the manual wheel when a federal agent came to him with a demandpresent all electronic correspondence. He was puzzled that the feds wanted to get in touch with someone who hadn't worked at Boeing for 22 years, and was a little worried that the criminal investigation would “freeze an open discussion,” which he considered fundamental to a safety culture, but decided to take it all as a positive sign that authorities are throwing a "unusually wide network" in search of those responsible for the MCAS and the murderous fogging around it. Lemme called Dominic Gates from The Seattle Timesand published his analysis the next day, tweaking for context a link to a video of the Mentour Pilot, in which one and the second pilot use the full force of their bodies to move the wheel about a degree or two before turning off the camera. It was an impartial, but still deeply unnerving reproduction of what Ethiopian pilots experienced.

“There was a small tsunami of people who voted because they felt safe,” said Dennis Tager, spokesman for the American Airlines Pilot Union, about the weeks following the crash in Ethiopia when pilots and engineers dropped their cowardice and unloaded everything that they had about a company whose “toxic culture of fear and intimidation” they blamed for the disaster. But fear and intimidation began to show again: Mentour Pilot removed his video,explaining that he should not have allowed himself such liberties amid a "ongoing investigation".

But the picture was becoming clearer: Boeing launched a suicide plane, and, showing grotesque cowardice, chose to send the pilots a protocol to counter the self-destruction mechanism, which killed them even faster. The Seattle Times called it "a nightmare for Boeing and the FAA."

But as the nightmare dragged on, clarity dulled slightly. We learned that with MAX there were other problems - esoteric and much less comprehensible than falls due to MCAS - as well as problems that arose from previous generations of cutting cornersbut such problems that the company and the agency are really trying to fix. We learned that the FAA certified the aircraft contrary to its claim that the aircraft “does not meet” their own safety standards due to the increased likelihood that any of its massive new engines will destroy the only set of steering wheel cables that should it fail in the air. (FAA does not prescribe cable repair).

We also learned that no one at the FAA wanted MAX certification — to the point that one of the engineers who took over the job told The New York Times that he was joking that he was on drugswhen agreed to this work. We learned that most of the MAX software was developed by Indian programmers at offshore sweatshops programming companies as part of a plan to gain ground in India, where Airbus dominates and where one airline placed an order for Boeing for $ 22 billion in 2017. We also learned that Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing senior executive and acting secretary of defense, who was nominated by President Trump and then removed from his post, was accused of beating his ex-wife in 2010 *. (Shenahan denied the allegation.)

But, as is usually the case when a corporate attacker is caught by the hand, we forgot about Boeing and MAX. Starting almost immediately after the disaster in Ethiopia, Daniel Elwell and Sam Graves, who at that time held the position of FAA Leader and Leading Republican on the House’s Transport and Infrastructure Committee, organized a coordinated campaign.to blame the crash on dead pilots. The essence of their arguments was that there was nothing to look at — that the correct implementation of the protocol in terms of spontaneous shifting of the stabilizer would save all 346 lives, and that the weak scandal of foreign pilot training was the real scandal behind these two air crashes. Graves, in the tradition of congressional show-off, called on the Department of Transportation to launch an investigation into this apparently defunct issue.

Pilot accusers took their key points from a blog post titled Boeing 737 Max 8 Crash: A Pilot Error Case, written by two pilots and published on the Seeking Alpha website . According to The Seattle Times , this post wasordered by one of the institutional shareholders of Boeing. And the narrative of the pilots' mistake was gaining additional momentum, collecting random minor sensations that appeared in the media in a voracious focus on the soap opera MAX. The Wall Street Journal , in particular, like a laser beam, focused on the actions of the pilots, even managing to translate the impossibility of manual control in the circumstances of the Ethiopian plane crash into a story about the new concern of the FAA that “female pilots” may not have the physical strength to fly on the old fashioned way.

What at first was an understandable story of goodness and greed, along with OxyContin and Ford Pinto, clearly illustrating the risks of executing instructions from investor managers, gradually turned into confusion and uncertainty. Aircraft were piling up in Victorville, California, where a remote airfield charges $ 2,000 per month for parking the aircraft in the low-corrosion, dried climate of the Inland Empire Desert. Graves appeared every few days on Fox News or Fox Business, and in one of his typical speeches he insisted : “I'm not concerned about the plane; I think the plane is very safe. We must concentrate on the training of pilots and the ability to fly an airplane, and not just use a computer. ”

The House Subcommittee on Aviation held regular hearings. Legislators on the Graves side declared themselves ready for an information war, and most of the commissioners were best represented by the chairman of the subcommittee, Rick Larsen, a former lobbyist from the New Democratic Coalition, who delivered the opening remarks of perplexing freshness : “As I said, if the population does not feel safe, they don’t fly; if they do not fly, then airlines do not need airplanes; if they don’t need planes, then planes do not need to be built; if aircraft do not need to be built, then there will be no jobs in aviation. ”

The Republican minority was led by Graves' colleague Paul Mitchell, a Michigan congressman who sharpened knives and called on all his righteous indignation to a clash with Dan Carey, outgoing president of the Allied Pilots Association (APA), American Airlines Pilot Union:

Captain Carey, you hit the headlines when you unveiled parts of an apparently secret record made in November ... Who made that record, sir?

Did the ARA board authorize this or know in advance that you were recording? Did you tell Boeing officials that you recorded before or after the meeting? .. Are you up to date - I'm sure you are aware - that in April you released a press release fully confirming the capabilities of 737 MAX?

What is the value of [making a secret entry] for the system or for families? .. Explain to me what was the basis for this, sir!

Carey had actually recorded a meeting seven months earlier with Boeing CEO Mike Sinnett - at the now infamous meeting, where Sinnett falsely assured the pilots that the failure of the MCAS was an event with almost zero probability, and that in any case, the failure of the MCAS never will not happen in the United States, because most airlines have paid extra to activate Disagree indicators in the cockpit. Boeing repeatedly blamed the dead pilots, even back in the era preceding the Stonesifer era, when a faulty steering wheel on the earlier 737 generation caused a series of crashes and near-critical incidents in the 1990s, and Boeing and his henchmen distributed the setalternative theories that pilots inexplicably (or intentionally) jammed control devices.

Carey felt that the story with MCAS was unfolding in a similar way, so he recorded a meeting in case another MCAS malfunction “with almost zero probability” - and it happened. If you had gone to Congressional hearings without knowing that another 157 people had died, you might have thought of Dan Carey, a pilot and trade unionist whose little attempt to contain the influence of the corporate giant was rewarded by losing the re-election campaign two weeks earlier, the most unscrupulous character in all this vile affair. (Mitchell who interrogated him, for reference, made his fortune, which probably exceeds $ 100 million, by selling a network of predatorycommercial junior colleges to a private investment firm, and his political reputation is in conflict with Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan, stupefied by the idea of economic asceticism and poorly coped with the water poisoning crisis).

I sat in the hall when this happened - this was my first appearance in the Rayburn House Office Congress building since the 2008 financial crisis. It’s almost embarrassing to tell me how painful it was to listen to how Mitchell and the company shamelessly powder their brains to everyone, just like the hard-willed congressional righteous did when they passed ACORN as the culpritthe collapse of 2008, or Iraq for the main culprit in the events of September 11 before that. ” Such people told much more lies in favor of much larger and scary customers with much more devastating consequences. And much more successful: no matter how the criminal case goes, more than 60 lawsuits have been filed against Boeing regarding MAX. No one who understands at least something about this believes that Boeing is out of danger, and those who understand a lot think that the road can go to bankruptcy court.

But it is also true that no one who at least understood something about this considered a good idea to reduce spending on research and development, dismissing half of the engineers, or subcontracting entire parts of the aircraft without preliminary design. And it hardly affected anything. “There were two manager camps: boy scouts and killer hunters,” recalls Cynthia Cole, a former Boeing engineer who led the Society of Professional Aerospace Engineers (SPEEA) during the saga from 787. “How can these two management philosophies be combined? Hunter killers will tear apart scouts. This is happening. ”

This is exactly what happened on an exponentially more disastrous scale in the field of mortgage lending and pharmaceutical sales, as well as in General Electric, which over the past decade has spent more than $ 50 billion on the purchase of its own shares, despite the fact that its enormous losses from the insurance business threaten to bankrupt company. (And this did not diminish GE’s zeal for de-industrialization, which devastated places like Fort Wayne, Erie and Schenectady, and laid off tens of thousands of people). This is exactly what happens with every well-meaning half measure aimed at mitigating the catastrophic effects of climate change.

None of this should be an ideological war, said Cole, a lifelong conservative who now chairs the King County Republican Party in Washington State and first joined the union - SPEEA membership was voluntary when she joined - because less than a few months later In her first engineering work, she, from a control room full of engineers, watched the landing of the space shuttle. The shuttle jumped up, there was a loud collective breath, and one of her colleagues let slip that the chassis was not strong enough to withstand certain weather conditions, and that if she wanted to keep her job, she should keep her mouth shut; a few months later she was fired. “I thought to myself - oh my God! This happens in the movies. ”

She then had no idea how sick she would feel from watching the same film.

But a month later, again in the same room on a very hot day, the son of Kenyan farmers returned a little moral clarity to the process : “As an investment professional, let me inform Congress about how Boeing assesses this whole crisis.” Noting that the stock had risen from $ 140 four years earlier to $ 446 on the eve of the crash, which killed his wife, son, four-year-old daughter, nine-month-old daughter and mother-in-law, Paul Njoroge outlined the sequence of placing orders for 737 MAX, allocating ten-digit amounts for share repurchases and the increase in dividends that awaited such a terrible fate for his family.

“Can this explain why Boeing did not feel obligated to stop the MAX flights even after the second crash of the Boeing 737 MAX?” - he asked. “Returning to my very significant question, why were the flights of MAX 8 not stopped in November after the first crash in the Java Sea? 189 people were killed, and the Boeing leadership was more concerned about the price of stocks than about preventing the recurrence of such a tragedy, "and therefore launched a" scheme for accusing innocent pilots.

“I am devastated,” he told the committee. "My life has no meaning." He met his wife while studying finance at the University of Nairobi. The family was distributed between Bermuda, where Paul worked as an investment manager at Butterfield Bank, and Ontario, where his wife and children settled. Paul was expected to join them later. Remoteness was hell, and before her he had never even had a girlfriend; his family was literally everything to him, he explained, and they all disappeared. “I have nightmares about how they probably clung to their crying mother, who saw fear in their eyes in that helpless state. It’s hard for me to think about anything other than the horror that they probably experienced. ”

After his testimony, the broken Njoroge stood in the corridor for almost three hours, giving interviews to dozens of journalists who needed exclusive video footage. He told me that he was not surprised that Boeing's shares have not fallen anymore since the company killed his family. Of course, he would never have bought them himself, but even now it would be difficult to justify their exclusion from the client portfolio.

Crash course: How the Boeing management revolution spawned the 737 MAX disaster

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