DUBLIN — Just over a week after an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 plane crashed shortly after takeoff, the model has been grounded worldwide and US government authorities are reportedly investigating its development. The fast-moving crisis and Boeing’s slow response to it, hold many lessons for companies. In a crisis, communication should be clear and honest, remedial action should go beyond what is called for, and the fears and questions of ordinary people should not be ignored. – Felicity Duncan
Prosecutors, Transportation Department Scrutinize Development of Boeing’s 737 MAX
By Andrew Tangel, Andy Pasztor and Robert Wall
(The Wall Street Journal) Federal prosecutors and Department of Transportation officials are scrutinising the development of Boeing Co.’s 737 MAX jetliners, according to people familiar with the matter, unusual inquiries that come amid probes of regulators’ safety approvals of the new plane.
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A grand jury in Washington, DC, issued a broad subpoena dated March 11 to at least one person involved in the 737 MAX’s development, seeking related documents, including correspondence, emails and other messages, one of these people said. The subpoena, with a prosecutor from the Justice Department’s criminal division listed as a contact, sought documents to be handed over later this month.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the Justice Department’s probe is related to scrutiny of the Federal Aviation Administration by the DOT inspector general’s office, reported earlier Sunday by The Wall Street Journal and that focuses on a safety system that has been implicated in the Oct. 29 Lion Air crash that killed 189 people, according to a government official briefed on its status. Aviation authorities are looking into whether the anti-stall system may have played a role in last week’s Ethiopian Airlines crash, which killed all 157 people on board.
The subpoena was sent a day after the Ethiopian Airlines crash a week ago.
Representatives of the DOT’s inspector general and the Justice Department declined to comment. The inspector general’s inquiry focuses on ensuring relevant documents and computer files are retained, according to the government official familiar with the matter.
A Boeing spokesman declined to comment, saying the Chicago-based company wouldn’t respond to questions concerning legal matters or governmental inquiries.
The Justice Department probe involves a prosecutor in the fraud section of the department’s criminal division, a unit that has brought cases against well-known manufacturers over safety issues, including Takata Corp.
In the U.S., it is highly unusual for federal prosecutors to investigate details of regulatory approval of commercial aircraft designs, or to use a criminal probe to delve into dealings between the FAA and the largest aircraft manufacturer the agency oversees. Probes of airliner programs or alleged lapses in federal safety oversight typically are handled as civil cases, often by the DOT inspector general. The inspector general, however, does have authority to make criminal referrals to federal prosecutors and has its own special agents.
Repeatedly over the years, U.S. aviation companies and airline officials have been sharply critical of foreign governments, including France, South Korea and others, for conducting criminal probes of some plane makers, their executives and in some cases, even individual pilots, after high-profile or fatal crashes. The FAA’s current enforcement policy stresses enhanced cooperation with domestic airlines and manufacturers—featuring voluntary sharing of important safety data—instead of seeking fines or imposing other punishment.
The US government scrutiny comes as Ethiopia’s transport minister, Dagmawit Moges, said there were “clear similarities” between the two crashes. US officials cautioned that it was too early to draw conclusions because data from the black boxes of the Ethiopian Airlines plane still need to be analysed.
The two crashes have sparked the biggest crisis Boeing has faced in about two decades, threatening sales of a plane model that has been the aircraft giant’s most stable revenue source and potentially making it more time consuming and difficult to get future aircraft designs certified as safe to fly.
The Transportation Department’s inquiry was launched in the wake of the Lion Air accident and is being conducted by its inspector general, which has warned two FAA offices to safeguard computer files, according to people familiar with the matter. The internal watchdog is seeking to determine whether the agency used appropriate design standards and engineering analyses in certifying the anti-stall system, known as MCAS.
The FAA said Sunday that the 737 MAX, which entered service in 2017, was approved to carry passengers as part of the agency’s “standard certification process,” including design analyses; ground and flight tests; maintenance requirements; and cooperation with other civil aviation authorities. Agency officials in the past have declined to comment on various decisions regarding specific systems. Sunday’s statement said the agency’s “certification processes are well established and have consistently produced safe aircraft.”
Earlier, a Boeing spokesman said: “The 737 MAX was certified in accordance with the identical FAA requirements and processes that have governed certification of all previous new airplanes and derivatives. The FAA considered the final configuration and operating parameters of MCAS during MAX certification, and concluded that it met all certification and regulatory requirements.”
Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg said in a statement Sunday the company continues to support the Ethiopian investigation, “and is working with the authorities to evaluate new information as it becomes available.”
Mr. Muilenburg added: “As part of our standard practice following any accident, we examine our aircraft design and operation, and when appropriate, institute product updates to further improve safety.”
A Department of Transportation spokesman declined to comment about the investigation by the inspector general. Representatives of the office couldn’t be reached on Sunday.
Governments world-wide have grounded the MAX, an updated version of the decades-old 737, while investigators and engineers seek clues.
The Department of Transportation inquiry, which hasn’t been previously reported, focuses on a Seattle-area FAA office that certifies the safety of brand new aircraft models and subsequent versions, as well as a separate office in the same region in charge of mandating training requirements and signing off on fleet-wide training programs, people familiar with the matter said.
Files and documents covered by the directive also pertain to the FAA’s decision that extra flight-simulator training on the automated system wouldn’t be required for pilots transitioning from older models, according to people familiar with the matter.
Officials in those offices have been told not to delete any emails, reports or internal messages pertaining to those topics, people familiar with the matter said, adding that the probe also is scrutinising communication between the FAA and Boeing.
The Department of Transportation inquiry is casting a wide net for documents about potential agency lapses just as House and Senate committees prepare for public hearings in the coming weeks that are expected to grill the FAA’s senior leadership on the same topics.
The DOT inquiry is likely to raise more questions about how Boeing designed the airliner, how pilots are trained to fly it and the decisions the FAA took approving the model. The result could be changes to how the FAA certifies aircraft models, particularly giving more scrutiny to design changes from earlier models.
The FAA is moving to require more extensive training on the anti-stall system than Boeing had been championing, according to people familiar with the deliberations. The more-robust instruction, consisting of pilots engaging in self-guided instruction on a laptop computer, would include more details and require more time to complete than reading a handout, according to people familiar with the matter. Boeing has been advocating comparatively limited training, the people said, consisting of new, written materials aviators would receive explaining operation of the automated stall-prevention feature—and how to respond if it malfunctions.
The investigation is the latest problem for a plane that was born in a different kind of corporate emergency, according to industry officials and engineers close to the company: an urgent need in 2011 to create a relatively small, fuel-efficient jetliner that could compete with a model from rival Airbus SE that had swiftly gained traction among customers. A person familiar with Boeing’s development of the plane said the company didn’t rush the project, which had been on the drawing board for some time then.
To meet the marketing and financial imperatives of speedy FAA certification, Boeing needed to build a plane that would handle basically the same as earlier versions of its 737. From the outset, that was a regulatory requirement in order to obtain certification as a so-called derivative model, which would translate into a significantly faster approval process and traditionally less FAA scrutiny of certain systems.
The automated anti-stall system, called the manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system, initially was intended to assist cockpit crews in the unlikely event that high-altitude, high-speed manoeuvres suddenly pushed up the nose more than aviators anticipated. The goal was to make cockpit controls behave the same as they did in previous models, even though behind the scenes the automated system was doing much of the work.
But as the engineering effort and flight tests progressed, according to industry and FAA officials familiar with the process, the Boeing team saw the same feature as a potentially important safety net for a different hazard highlighted in previous crashes: lower-altitude stalls in which startled pilots mistakenly pulled back on the controls and sometimes crashed aircraft. FAA officials also recognised the potential benefits and approved the system as part of the overall MAX approval.
Outside experts now contend both Boeing and the FAA underestimated the accompanying risks – and installed a system that wasn’t highlighted in manuals or pilot training.
The FAA’s green light, according to safety experts and former agency officials, came in part because earlier versions of the 737 had proved so safe.
During some of the discussions with the FAA, according to people familiar with the matter, Boeing’s team persuaded the agency that the system shouldn’t be considered so essential that its failure could result in a catastrophic accident. As a result, it would be acceptable for the system to rely on a single sensor. In the Lion Air crash, investigators believe, faulty data sent by a single sensor led the MCAS system to erroneously push the plane’s nose down steeply, triggering a fatal plunge into the ocean.
The MAX’s grounding threatens Boeing’s ability to generate cash with plane deliveries halted. Boeing, which has been minting 737s at an unprecedented clip of 52 planes a month, plans to reach 57 planes monthly this year.
The 737 has been a cash cow for Boeing since shortly after it entered service in 1967. Last year, Boeing delivered to Southwest Airlines Co. the 10,000th 737 to roll off its production line in Seattle. It was an industry record for any airliner. The company has a backlog of more than 4,600 of the planes airlines have ordered and yet to receive.
Boeing was toying with a new plane to replace the 737, launched in 1967, and had engineers working on the new plane concept. While many airlines liked the idea, existing 737 customers didn’t want to retrain their pilots at huge cost and so lobbied for an updated, more-efficient 737 they could also get faster and more cheaply.
Then in 2011 Boeing learned that American Airlines , one of its best customers, had struck a tentative deal with Airbus for potentially hundreds of A320neo planes to renew its short-haul fleet. American invited Boeing to make a counter-offer. Boeing realized it needed to act fast, and offered what would become the MAX.
A senior Boeing executive said late Sunday the MAX was the company’s clear choice from options including a new airplane or a re-engine of the 737 NG. “The decision had to offer the best value to customers, including operating economics as well as timing, which was clearly a strong factor,” this executive said, noting the company embarked on a six-year, consistent and methodical development program.
American eventually bought 260 Airbus planes and agreed to take 200 upgraded 737s from Boeing.
To win customers, and avoid more defections to Airbus, Boeing also made commitments that there would be minimal requirements for new pilot training, which can be costly to airlines, especially if expensive flight-simulator sessions are needed, according to people familiar with the matter. So Boeing tried to minimise differences from its existing fleet. Pilots were never specifically trained, for instance, on the MCAS system. There remains disagreement among US pilots about whether such additional training was necessary since an existing procedure would disable the system.
Boeing has said it developed the MAX’s training and manuals as part of its normal process and its aim was to provide information pilots needed to safely operate the aircraft. The FAA approved the manuals and training.
Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight deck design engineer who worked on the MAX but wasn’t directly involved with the MCAS system, said managers applied significant pressure to keep costs low and timetables quick.
“The pressure was incredible to be fast” to keep pace with Airbus, Mr. Ludtke said.
A former senior Boeing official recalled a “healthy urgency that comes from competition” in producing the MAX, but no “undue pressure on the design or the team.”
The senior Boeing executive added: “Safety is our highest priority as we design, build and support our airplanes.”
A Boeing spokesman didn’t immediately respond Sunday to a request for comment about the former Boeing engineer and official’s recollections.
Boeing started building the first MAX in June 2015.
– Aruna Viswanatha, Ted Mann, Gabriele Steinhauser and Daniel Michaels contributed to this article.
Write to Andrew Tangel at [email protected], Andy Pasztor at [email protected] and Robert Wall at [email protected]
