It’s Not “Boeing’s Fatal Flaw” – It’s Capitalism’s

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On September 14, 2021, after the British racial documentary 400 Years: Taking the Knee, KPBS showed an episode of the long-running documentary series Frontline called “Boeing’s Fatal Flaw,” written and directed by Thomas Jennings and featuring several New Yorkn Times journalists who worked on stories exposing the Boeing 737 Max airliner’s design and equipment flaws that led to two dire plane crashes that killed almost 350 people between them in 2018 and 2019. The first took place in October 2018 in Jakarta, Indonesia and involved a plane, fully loaded with passengers, that suddenly started diving to earth shortly after takeoff. According to the so-called “black box” flight recorder (something of a misnomer because we got to see footage of it and it was not black, but red), the plane had suddenly started diving and the pilots had tried to pull it back up, but the plane’s controls refused to let them. Indonesian aircraft analyst Gerry Soejatman told Frontline, “The plane went up to about 2,000 feet, just over a minute after takeoff, and the plane had a bit of a dive. And then the plane climbed to about 5,000 feet. But then, at 5,000 feet, the plane was fluctuating up and down. And then the plane just started diving. It just didn’t make sense. You don't see planes diving on departure. I was baffled. Why did it go down?”

In March 2019 a Boeing 737 Max being flown out of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on a routine flight to Nairobi, Kenya did the same thing: as its pilots were trying to get it airborne the plane suddenly started diving to earth and nothing the flight crew tried to do could stop it. Joe Jacobsen, aviation safety engineer with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) – the agency that is supposed to regulate the aircraft industry and ensure that planes are safe – said that when he looked at the black box recordings from that crash, “It didn't take long — just a couple of minutes — to see that there was rapid movement of the horizontal stabilizer. … [T]he fastest way to kill yourself in an airplane is to have the stabilizer malfunction.” If you know what a plane looks lille, you’ll be aware that in addition to the big wings midway down the fuselage (the main body of the aircraft), which has flaps (called “ailerons”) that control the plane’s direction and allow it to turn, there’s a big tail at the back end and two little wings under it. Those are the horizontal stabilizers, and their purpose is to control the plane’s vertical motion and make it go up, go down or stay horizontal as the flight plan specifies and the pilots direct. If it doesn’t do that – especially if it goes down while the pilots are trying to get the plane to go up – the result is often a catastrophic crash.

New York Times reporter James Glanz saw the reports on the black-box data from both 737 crashes and decided there was a story in it. “The plane continually tried to push the nose down, and the pilots were trying over and over again to stop the plane. And in the end, they lose that battle,” he told Frontline. Boeing officials blamed the crashes on pilot error and they sent an advisory to the airlines that were using the 737 Max and the pilots that were actually flying it, but their advisory was incomplete and didn’t let the pilots know what they were up against. What they were up against was a new piece of computer software called Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MACS for short. MACS had originally been designed for use in military fighter planes that cruise at high altitudes and frequently are flown in high-risk maneuvers to fight off or elude enemy planes. Its purpose was to take over the controls automatically if the plane stalled in mid-air and threatened to fall out of the sky and crash. The New York Times reporters on the 737 story – James Glanz, Natalie Kitroeff, David Gelles and Jack Nicas – identified MACS as the problem with the 737 and the likely cause of both crashes after examining the radar records of both flights that had crashed, and finding them eerily similar. They learned that after an early test flight of the 737 Max had been unusually bumpy and the pilots complained that the plane hadn’t handled smoothly, Boeing management decided to extend the MACS system so it would work not only in high-altitude flight but at low altitudes, including take-offs and landings. Doug Pasternak, a staff member for a Congressional investigation into the 737 Max crashes, found a tell-tale document of a pilot who had “flown” in a test simulator of the 737 Max’s controls in November 2012 and had had the same problem the real-life pilots did six and seven years later: he lost control and, had he been flying for real, the plane would likely have crashed and killed everyone aboard.

But instead of either modifying MACS or eliminating it altogether, Boeing management decided on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy: they simply omitted any reference to MACS from the manual given to 737 Max pilots. The reason was that Boeing was in a fierce competition with the European company Airbus, the world’s only other major supplier of large aircraft to airlines, and they wanted the 737 Max out not only as soon as possible but as cheaply as possible. At least one customer, Southwest Airlines – which had ordered 200 737 Max’s – demanded a rebate from Boeing if their pilots had to be retrained to handle the new aircraft. So Boeing simply didn’t tell anyone – the airlines, the pilots, or the government agency supposedly regulating them – that there were fundamental differences between the way the 737 Max handled in the air and the way previous Boeing 737’s had. What made it even worse was that on the 737 Max, the MACS was set to trigger in case there was an anomalous reading from one of the so-called “Angle of Attack” (AOA) sensors on either side of the back end of the plane. AOA readings from a single sensor are notoriously inaccurate; that’s why planes have two of them. Boeing eventually modified the MACS so it wouldn’t turn on unless both AOA sensors were reading deviations from the correct flight path, but it was too late for the victims of the Indonesian and Ethiopian crashes.

The FAA missed the possibility of a MACS failure with catastrophic consequences because for decades it and other government agencies supposedly in business to regulate private industry no longer do so. Instead they do something called “delegation,” which basically means outsourcing the task of regulating giant corporations to … the corporations themselves. Michael Huerta, former FAA executive, defended this process to Frontline. “There are those that believe it is the fox guarding the henhouse. Here is why it’s not,” he said in a masterpiece of Orwellian doublethink. “The company has an organization whose responsibility is to ensure that it is in compliance with the standards that are set by the FAA, and it has a level of independence from the entities that they’re overseeing.” Various countries – first China, then several other countries, then finally the United States – grounded the Boeing 737 Max in the wake of the Indonesian and Ethiopian crashes. Boeing CEO Dennis Mullenburg lost his job and was replaced by another clueless middle-aged white guy, David Calhoun. Boeing eventually modified MACS so it would only be triggered if both AOA sensors reported anomalies, and it also offered pilots more instruction on how to handle the situation if the MACS sensors kicked in and sent the plane downwards regardless of what the pilots wanted it to do. They were told to handle it as if the plane’s stabilizers had malfunctioned normally and grab a little wheel in the cockpit to turn the stabilizers manually. If you can imagine driving your car when the power steering suddenly goes out and you have to steer the car manually, imagine trying to do that in a huge airplane in which the part you suddenly have to move by your own muscle power is a huge piece of metal weighing several hundred pounds.

When the Boeing 737 Max crashes first occurred, I thought they were an object lesson in how we’ve become too dependent on computers and how we’ve incorporated them into our lives whether they really help make things more convenient or not, especially in systems like the 737 Max’s MACS where we’ve given the human controllers little or no way to fight back when the computer reacts to faulty data and makes a mistake. This Frontline presentation shows that the 737 Max crisis had a lot to do with the fundamental evil of capitalism and the futility of any attempt to regulate it. From the initial development of the 737 Max to the deliberate concealment of the MACS system from the pilots expected to fly the plane, “Boeing’s Fatal Flaw” is an indictment of capitalism itself and also the decisions by government regulators to cozy up to industry and basically let giant businesses like Boeing regulate themselves – which (sorry, Michael Huerta) is putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Maybe I was a bit more sensitive to it after having watched 400 Years: Taking the Knee, but there seemed to me to be more than a bit of racism in Boeing’s attitude, blaming the crashes on pilots of color (Pacific Islanders in the Indonesian crash and Blacks in the Ethiopian one) and suggesting that fine, upstanding white American boys could have avoided the crashes and kept the planes safely under control. Frontline’s reporters directly asked Boeing CEO David Calhoun that very question, and he said, “We made a decision in December [2019] to recommend simulator training everywhere in the world because of the regulators and the pilots in the developing world. Not because the U.S. airlines needed it. They probably don’t.” When they pressed him on whether he thought American pilots could have bypassed the MACS and avoided the fatal crashes, Calhoun demanded that his answer not be filmed or recorded – and when Frontline refused to go along, Calhoun cut short the interview. (An American pilot interviewed on the program reviewed the radar data from the Ethiopian crash and told Frontline the Ethiopian pilots did everything he would have done in the same situation.) Today the Boeing 737 Max is once again in the air, flying passengers all around the world. Maybe additional pilot training and the minor modifications Boeing made to the MACS are enough to keep the plane’s passengers safe and give the pilots the tools they need to avoid another catastrophe like the ones in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Maybe they aren’t.