BOOK REVIEW

“Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing” by Peter Robison. Doubleday. 327 pp. $30. Review provided by The Washington Post.

On Oct. 29, 2018, a new Boeing jetliner carrying 189 people lifted off from Jakarta, Indonesia, for a one-hour flight to Pangkal Pinang. Twelve minutes later, the plane, run by the Indonesian airline Lion Air, plowed at a near-vertical angle into Jakarta Bay, traveling at 500 mph. There were no survivors. Five months later, an eerie coincidence: Another new Boeing jetliner – a model known as the 737 Max 8, the same as in the Lion Air disaster – took off from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on its way to Kenya. Six minutes later, it crashed to the ground, killing all 157 people aboard. The impact was so forceful that much of the plane disintegrated.

Who – or what – was responsible for the tragedies in Indonesia and Ethiopia forms the central inquiry of Peter Robison’s powerful and unsettling book, “Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing.” Almost immediately after the crashes, it became evident that there were serious safety concerns about the Max. Boeing had apparently designed an airplane that would sometimes leave pilots fighting desperately against software that could override their instructions and nosedive their jets into the ground. But were these tragedies caused by engineering blunders – or, as Boeing suggested in their immediate aftermath, pilot errors?

Robison, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg, argues that the story of the 737 Max presents us with a parable of what happens when a great American corporation chooses financial rewards over quality. “How did a company that prided itself on its engineering prowess, that had perfectionism in its DNA, go so wildly off course?” he asks. For the answer, he takes us back to the origins of Boeing, to the early days of the 737 and to a flawed series of decisions, some going back decades, that sealed the fate of hundreds of innocent passengers.

At the start, there was nothing obviously wrong with the 737. Designed in haste in the mid-1960s as a workhorse for shorter routes, the plane was built for airline customers who sought value and simplicity. “The need to keep expenses down,” Robison said, “forced compromises, decisions that would one day hamstring Boeing’s attempts to shoehorn in more sophisticated technology.” But for decades those cheap 737s proved popular, especially for carriers like Southwest Airlines, which wanted affordable aircraft for budget fliers. Southwest, in fact, made the 737 the only model in a huge fleet that allowed any of its crew to fly any of its aircraft. And so the plane that one executive likened to an old pickup truck – ugly and unsophisticated, but also reliable – in time became an institution. Even as Boeing upgraded the 737 design in subsequent years with more seats and bigger engines (and a fix for a faulty rudder design), the aircraft’s simplicity, in its cabin as well as its cockpit controls, remained a signature feature. As young airlines grew up in Africa and Asia to serve new customers on local routes, they turned to the cheap and unadorned 737 as a sensible choice.

There were problems on the horizon. The first was a new competitor, the European business consortium Airbus, which was wooing customers away from Boeing with sleek designs. To compete with a midsize Airbus model, Boeing had a choice: Should it retire the 737 and create a new model? Or should it try yet another upgrade, which would be far cheaper? Another way of looking at the dilemma was to ask: Should the company invest $20 billion? Or should it spend $2.5 billion? It chose the latter. And the result was the 737 Max 8, with much larger engines and a special software program, known as MCAS, that Boeing engineers thought would correct strange flight behavior resulting from the 737’s heavy engines and its new-and-old patchwork design. For the most part, Boeing managers seemed not to worry that flying this “difficult beast” might require additional training that many pilots would not receive.

Another force was pushing Boeing in a dangerous direction: Its corporate culture had become increasingly mercenary. Robison points to Boeing’s merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997 as a moment when the Seattle manufacturer, organized more around engineering excellence than quarterly financial gains, was transformed by a group of executives with an unrelenting focus on the bottom line. He makes a persuasive case that the McDonnell Douglas insurgency, likened by one observer to “assassins” who overtook Boeing’s “Boy Scouts,” essentially changed the course of Boeing. Corporate directives soon championed cost-cutting and shareholder value above all else. Parts for new planes, such as the 787, were outsourced to smaller (and cheaper) suppliers, sometimes resulting in disastrous delays. A succession of new executives who had been schooled at the knee of Jack Welch at General Electric took charge. None were engineers. But all were focused on reducing costs, circumventing workers’ unions and reaping the rewards that came with boosting revenue. A case in point: The year of the Lion Air crash, Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing’s chief executive and chairman, took home $31 million in pay and performance bonuses.

The portrait Robison paints of Boeing – a company that compromised its meticulously designed products in service to profitability – is a depressing one. A reader may envision the terrible outcomes before they even occur. But the author’s characterization of regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration broadens the reach of the Max scandal. In crucial respects, from the early 2000s on, Boeing regulated itself, with government officials in charge of oversight duties actually awarded incentives to help the manufacturer meet certification targets. When it came to sniffing out Boeing managers’ half-truths about the 737’s faulty software, the agency was at a huge disadvantage. And instead of challenging Boeing’s contention that pilots would not need hours of flight simulator training for the new Max plane, the FAA backed down. The regulators, Robison writes, “had become a rubber stamp.”

“Flying Blind” stalls in a few places. While Robison does an able job of illuminating the implications of the 737’s flaws, his technical explanations of the MCAS software and the plane’s operational system – a small part of his narrative, but a crucial one – are opaque. I worry this may leave readers who lack an engineering or aerospace background more confused rather than less. At the same time, the dizzying complexity of Boeing (with more than 140,000 employees) and of a commercial jetliner (with about 600,000 parts) means it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of characters and their work details. And yet even with these shortcomings, Robison’s book is a page-turner. What’s more, it demonstrates that the problems leading to the Boeing crashes may not yet be solved. On the one hand, the Max, with fixes to its software and new requirements for pilot training, is back in the air; the FAA has also apparently tightened its regulatory approach. But readers may find themselves haunted by the question of whether a global company will in the future choose a long-term solution that requires time and substantial investments over a risky, short-term fix that pleases Wall Street.

One can only hope that the next generation of corporate executives will read Robison’s book and embrace its most penetrating insight: With lawsuits and order cancellations, the cost of transforming the stodgy 737 into the Max will, in the end, prove far more expensive to Boeing than what it would have cost to design a new and better aircraft from scratch. And this calculation doesn’t even include the incalculable damage to the company’s reputation. Sometimes, lest we forget, the harder path will prove to be the smarter path.

– Reviewed by Jon Gertner, who is the author of “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation” and “The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future.”