Boeing's Malfeasance

                                                          

I saw a segment about the Ethiopian Airlines crash on the PBS Newshourlast night that leaves me spitting—convinced, yet again, that the behavior inevitably fostered by the demands of capitalism lead directly to malfeasance and, in this case, murder. Jeff Wise is a science writer specializing in aviation and psychology, one who’s written a book about the Malaysia airlines flight that vanished in 2014. When asked about the problems of automation on airliners as they related to the recent crash, he said that generally automation has been a good thing, saving the pilot from having to deal with “mundane stuff” and allowing him or her to concentrate on more important factors—something that has led to increased airline safety in recent years. Serious problems, however, may arise when the pilot is inexperienced and system overload dumps all the decisions back onto the pilot. Some have speculated that this is what happened in the recent crashes. 

            But then Wise got to the real nitty-gritty, Boeing’s 737. Turns out it’s the most profitable and most popular airplane Boeing builds, having been started in 1967. The problem, Wise pointed out, is that the plane is now a creature of a bygone era: it’s built of aluminum, and uses hydraulics instead of the “fly-by-wire” systems of modern airliners. But Boeing makes so much money from these planes, said Wise, that they’ve been trying to “stretch out its lifespan,” mainly by adding new fuel-efficient engines onto an aging airframe that wasn’t designed for this type of engine. And note well: “they had to sacrifice some flight characteristics in order to get it to work.” 

            Now we come to the problem: the 737s with those new engines, “had sort of a disturbing tendency to pitch up in certain circumstances.” In short, the plane’s nose tended to head upward, as in a steep climb that could lead to a stall. So what did Boeing do to salvage its big money-maker? “They kind of kludged it with this patch, this automation software that would kick in.” This is the now-infamous computerized system that tips the plane downward, towards the earth—to compensate for the upward pitch it tended towards with its new engine. And then Boeing added insult to injury: its sales pitch assured customers that things were now fine, the 737 MAX8 was part of the rest of their 737 fleet and would fly the same way. Best of all, “You don’t have to buy a whole bunch of new parts, like you would if we built a whole new plane.” Classic selling point: this jerry-built model is not only as good as the old one, it’s better! You don’t even have to retrain pilots, as you would with a whole new design, but keep them on as if they were flying the old 737s. 

            So—pilots, especially those in foreign countries, were nottold about the computer system that had “fixed” the 737s they were now flying. The selling point was specifically that pilots did not need retraining. And so they got none. And so unexpected situations occurred, and the 737s flown by Indonesia’s Lion Air in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines just last week started to pitch upwards, presumably, and that wonderful computerized “patch” no doubt kicked in to correct it, and the pilots had no idea what the hell was going on, and suddenly the airplane with hundreds of innocents aboard was racing nose first into the unforgiving earth or ocean. All passengers dead. 

            Now consider the fact that though, after the Lion Air crash was analyzed and the FAA “issued warnings and training advisories to all operators of the 737 MAX” so as to avoid any similar problems, “these advisories were not fully implemented” (quotes from Wikipedia article, “Lion Air Flight 610”). In other words, that warning should have prompted Boeing, at the very least, to make sure pilots were made aware of what the plane’s tendencies were, and what the computer “fix” was supposed to do. Apparently, this did not happen, or not fully. Boeing, after all, didn’t want to raise alarms about its most profitable airplane. So Ethiopian Airlines was allowed to keep flying its 737s in the dark, until March 10, when the plane dove directly into the earth shortly after takeoff. 

            The CEO of Boeing is Dennis Muilenberg. His compensation for 2017 was $15 million. On March 13, three days after the Ethiopian Airlines crash of his plane, Newsweekreported that Muilenberg phoned his friend President Trump (Democracy Nowreported that Trump has not only praised Boeing hundreds of times, but actually assisted it in selling its airplanes to foreign countries) to “assure him of the aircraft’s safety.” While dozens of other countries grounded the 737s in their fleets, acting FAA Administrator Daniel Elwell refused to do that in the U.S. until more was known, adding that “our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft.” Newsweekalso reported on the “cozy relationship between the aviation giant and U.S. politicians and agencies,” as well as between Boeing and the government regulators. Said Jim Hall, former head of the NTSB, “The manufacturer essentially becomes the manufacturer andthe regulator.” Finally, the Center for Responsive Politics noted that in 2018, Boeing spent “a total of $15 million” on lobbying the U.S Government, with whom it has extensive military contracts (acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan spent 31 years as a Boeing executive). 

            So there it is. In our system, the incentive to make a profit leads a major airplane manufacturer to push the life of its big money-maker, the 737, so far that it turns the plane into a flying death trap. More than 180 people lost their lives in the Lion Air crash, and nearly 160 more in the Ethiopian Airlines disaster. Both crashes might have been averted if a) Boeing concerned itself as much with the safety of passengers as with its bottom line, b) the government and its regulators were not so “cozy” with the company. But in the United States, particularly these days, coziness and the bottom line rule; plain old people come in a distant second. After all, the price of gross malfeasance isn’t so bad—only a few hundred deaths in parts of the world that don’t really count, and maybe even a bonus severance package for the CEO. 

Lawrence DiStasi