Book Review: Flying Blind - The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

One assumes airplanes are safe. As in, totally, completely safe. In recent decades, air travel has become so commonplace, so mundane, we never ever think we might be at any sort of risk when flying. Given the number of accidents that happen every single day on roads – involving cars, motorcycles, trucks and buses – flying seems to be so much safer. And for the most part, it is. Things don’t go wrong too often, but when they do – when planes crash – those who are in those planes don’t usually walk away. Almost inevitably, lives are lost. Sometimes, these accidents in aviation do happen by chance, a freak occurrence, something that nobody could have predicted or prevented in any way. But some do happen because of sheer negligence and/or shoddy engineering. Peter Robinson’s book, Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, is the shocking story of how things went wrong at Boeing, an American icon and one of the most respected, trusted aircraft manufacturers in the world.

While the book starts with some background on Boeing, its early years and how it became one of the world’s most prominent, dominant airplane manufacturers in the world, the real story here is the development of one of its planes – the 737 Max 8 – and how, right from the beginning, corners were cut, safety was completely disregarded and the basic rules of engineering were ignored, all in the name of cutting costs. It’s a cautionary tale of how, when workplace culture goes wrong and corporate greed takes over, even the biggest companies can get to the very brink of disaster. Swiftly. And sometimes, with no scope to turn back and make things right.

In the case of Boeing, Robinson writes about how things began to go wrong for Boeing with its acquisition of / merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. The deal was worked out by Boeing’s CEO Philip Condit and McDonnell Douglas’s CEO Harry Stonecipher, and the synergies were supposed to work wonders for Boeing, giving it access to key government contacts and, hopefully, lucrative contracts from US defense forces. What really happened was that the McDonnell Douglas guys walked all over Boeing and imposed their own culture and workplace practices on the latter, forever changing the basic ways in which the airplane manufacturer functioned. Stonecipher, a hard-charging, combative, arrogant lout, who somehow ended up in the top spot at Boeing, changed the company’s entire focus from being engineering- and innovation-oriented to putting costs, so called ‘efficiencies,’ and returns to shareholders at the very top of its list of priorities.

With frequent share buybacks and rich dividends to paid to shareholders (as well as filling the coffers of Stonecipher & Co.) at the expense of severely reduced R&D budgets, diminished engineering systems and processes and constant lobbying for reduced role of the FAA (the Federal Aviation Administration, which was earlier entrusted with supervising the safety aspect of Boeing aircraft) to the point where FAA officials became entirely ineffective, Stonecipher ran things the way he wanted and passenger safety was nowhere on his agenda. His successors also chose to carry on his legacy, paring costs down to the bone, pushing production teams to their limit and beyond, and outsourcing operations wherever possible, getting things done in the cheapest way possible, ignoring all possible outcomes along the way.

Flying Blind tells, in intricate detail, backed up by the author’s extensive and deep research, the shoddy way in which the Boeing 737 Max 8 was developed and how, despite being well aware of its serious shortcomings in the context of safety, and its potential for disaster when faced with a certain set of situations during taking off, how Boeing pushed for its clearance, with the collusion of the FAA. The company essentially tried to install a half-baked software solution for a hardware-related problem, since reengineering the hardware would have been a more time-consuming and expensive process. At one point, the Boeing team knew the software solution was not adequate and that it would not work, but the company hid that information from its customers and regulators. Inevitably, there were crashes – Indonesia’s Lion Air pilots had a fatal crash in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines had a fatal crash in March 2019, both because of the faulty software – MCAS – which essentially took over the planes’ controls and despite the pilots’ best efforts, made the aircraft go down, killing 346 people.

Robinson, who spoke to hundreds of stakeholders (Boeing and FAA employees and many, many others) as part of his research for the book, writes about the extreme lengths to which Boeing went to cover up their own guilt, how they tried to pass the blame to the pilots, the desperate attempts to avoid paying penalties and the Boeing leadership’s devious, Machiavellian ways in which they tried to deceive all stakeholders – their own customers (the many airlines that had bought the 737 Max), the US government and the people whose families died in the fatal crashes of 2018 and 2019. Boeing’s tales of greed, the intent to deceive and defraud, the sheer incompetence, the willful disregard for safety, the complete lack of value for human lives and, in the end, the continuing callousness and an inhuman lack of compassion – it’s all shocking beyond belief. How could a company like Boeing – a name that most would trust and respect if they did not know the 737 Max story – go down this path, and shamelessly stick to their guns despite being proven a conniving bunch of liars and cheats? Nobody knows, but Boeing’s name has forever been sullied by the 737 Max saga, and Flying Blind tells that story like nobody else has, yet, or ever will in the future.

Flying Blind is available on Amazon