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…

America’s top transportation safety official, and a former 737 captain told U.S. senators on Wednesday what he might have done if he was in the cockpit of one of the Boeing 737 Maxs that inexplicably and repeatedly went nose down before crashing in Indonesia and Ethiopia. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman, Robert Sumwalt replied to that hypothetical question saying, “Well, I flew the 737 for 10 years, and I do believe there is a procedure on the Flintstone version of the 737 I flew, a very old 737, but I do believe the first thing I would do is oppose that motion by pulling the… Read More…

Were times simpler in the sixties, or was there something unique about Joseph Sutter that allowed him to do what airplane makers can’t seem to accomplish now? We can speculate but Sutter, one of the creative engineering minds behind the Boeing 747 gets the credit for taking what was then the world’s largest passenger jet from concept to flight in just 29 months. “When we designed the 707,” Sutter recalled, of the days before his 747 assignment, Boeing wrote the certification rules for the jet. “The CAA, the FAA wasn’t around yet, they didn’t know how to certify an airplane. We taught them how to… Read More…