The photo is of the new Singapore Airlines Boeing 737-8. Except it’s not really. It’s a Boeing 737 MAX, the most controversial engineering makeover of the past 20 years. Singapore Airlines just don’t want you to know that it’s a ‘MAX’ with all the safety baggage that monicker now carries.
A new book is out “Flying Blind — The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing”, published by Doubleday. It’s a book you need to read if you fly on commercial planes. It’s out on the book shelves at the same time Indonesian flying authorities lift a ban on the latest Boeing 737 model, more than 3 years after a Lion Air disaster that saw the loss of all 189 people on board, just off Jakarta.
Investigative journalist Peter Robinson catalogues a litany of key failings that were eventually responsible for the deaths of 346 people and how the incidents eventually revealed, what Peter describes as, “the rotted culture of an iconic American company”. His book lays out the argument that these ‘incidents’ were not ‘accidents’ and that the loss of lives of all 346 were totally avoidable.
Take the story of Curtis Ewbank who would eventually be redeemed after walking out of Boeing in 2015, three years before the first crashes of the 737 MAX occurred.
He was a Boeing flight control engineer who raised concerns about the safety of a new flight control software that was designed to correct odd flight characteristics imposed on the plane after newer, larger, heavier engines were added to the 50 year old design.
Boeing originally launched the 737 back in 1967 and had twice rolled out updates for the platform. They were updates that wouldn’t require retraining for the pilots – a key cost for airlines introducing new model aircraft.
To squeeze just one more makeover out of the 737 design, without starting a new clean-sheet single-aisle jet, Boeing rushed into a series of mis-steps which eventually ended up in the deaths of 349 people.
The new, large, turbo…