Boeing’s much-discussed but hardly assured shake-up was announced early this morning. The company CEO, David Calhoun will resign at the end of 2024, and the president of the Commercial Airplane division, Stan Deal leaves immediately. Chairman of the Board, Larry Kellner will not run for reelection to the post he has held for the past 5 years. “The eyes of the world are on us, and I know we will come through this moment a better company,” Calhoun said in a letter. How strong the desire was to improve in areas beyond those linked directly to the bottom line is debatable. I suspect what finally… Read More…

October 24, 2022 – This post has been updated to include statements from Delta A Federal Judge in Texas stated the obvious late Friday when he ruled that the families of people killed on Boeing 737 Max aircraft were victims of crimes Boeing has acknowledged committing during the design of the airplane. In 2018 and 2019, 346 people died in two separate crashes; one in Indonesia and the other in Ethiopia which largely were the result of Boeing’s intentional actions. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, however, has taken the position that the government, not the families of the dead, was Boeing’s victim. This is more… Read More…

News bulletins today related to the crash of China Eastern Flight 5735 include the disclaimer that the Boeing 737 that plunged to earth killing 132 people, is not the notorious 737 MAX. Most news consumers, indeed most air travelers, know at least a glimmer of the story of the MAX, a flawed Boeing product that produced two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. They know less about the 737 NG. What remains practically a secret, is that the 737 NG was the subject of a decade-long series of court cases filed by Boeing whistleblowers who say the NGs are poorly constructed and at risk of… Read More…

In the world of air accident investigations, finding out what led to a crash is followed by finding out why. Why is critical. That’s one reason I often write about the fallacy of attributing an accident to “pilot error”. Pilots (mechanics, designers, schedulers, dispatchers, flight attendants, etc.) will make mistakes, that is inevitable. Tracking those errors upstream to see what in the system led to those mistakes is how aviation gets safer. Or, as Key Dismukes, one of my favorite human factors scientists once told me, “The airplane, the designer, and the pilot are part of a complex system. Under certain circumstances, things happen that… Read More…

Saturday, July 17th marks the 25th anniversary of the crash of TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747 that exploded shortly after takeoff from New York, killing all 230 people on board.  While many events since that day in 1996 have eclipsed the story in size and scope (the 9/11 attacks and the Corona pandemic to name but two) the theory lives on that the official cause of the crash was covered up. “Look-backs” at the accident necessarily include the unlikely scenario that the flight from New York to Paris was felled by a missile. But the theory flies in the face of overwhelming evidence that… Read More…

An attorney whose work defending the environment 30-years ago was the subject of the Hollywood movie Erin Brockovich,  has been cast as the latest villain in the never-ending-drama of the Boeing 737 Max. Tom Girardi, of Girardi Keese in Los Angeles, has been fined, the assets of his firm frozen and he appears to be the subject of a federal criminal investigation. The once-respected attorney is accused of stealing the money Boeing sent to him to settle several suits in the October 2018 Lion Air crash. In a lawsuit filed in Northern District of Illinois Federal Court, Chicago attorney Jay Edelson compares Girardi to the… Read More…

  Over the course of 7 months in 2011, Boeing did an about-face. While in January it eschewed the idea of putting new engines on its 44-year old workhorse, the 737, by July, executives embraced the idea. The change in attitude was in response to the re-engined Airbus A 320 neo, which was racking up orders for the Toulouse-based planemaker, including some from formerly loyal Boeing airline customers. The calculation that it would be cheaper and faster to tweak an old model than to design a new one, led to the Boeing 737 Max. Like a Greek tragedy, with all of the sorrow, the intrigue,… Read More…

Boeing’s campaign to underplay and withhold information about a software system linked to two deadly air disasters goes back to the earliest days of the airliner’s design, a new report from the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General says. The report released on Wednesday is one of several launched following two crashes of Boeing 737 Max airliners that killed a total of 346 people in late 2018 and March of 2019. After the second accident, Boeing’s brand new airliner was grounded globally and it hasn’t flown in commercial service since. It is a record-setting halt in operations for a new airliner, surpassing even the infamous British… Read More…

For those who like to gamble, the stakes are pretty high on one simple yes or no question, Will the Boeing 737 MAX fly again? I think it is unlikely, but on that, I am in the minority. Wednesday’s U.S. Senate hearing at which FAA administrator Stephen Dickson is scheduled to testify could provide some clues to the airplane’s future. (You can watch the hearing live here, beginning at 10:00 a.m. EST.) Over the past few weeks, I’ve reached out to industry insiders for their opinions. Few shared my gloomy view about the MAX. It seems that the sixties-era, twin-engine jetliner with the fancy new… Read More…

Boeing’s decision to keep from investigators text messages from 2016 in which a 737 Max test pilot, Mark Forkner, worried that there were egregious problems with the airplane’s flight control system prompted the Administrator of the Federal Aviation  Administration two weeks ago to demand answers from Boeing. In a letter to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, Steve Dickson wrote that he expected an immediate explanation. Likely, members of the Senate Commerce Committee will make a similar demand of Muilenburg when he testifies on Tuesday. To be clear, however, this is not the first time that Boeing purposefully withheld information that would have been useful to investigators…. Read More…