By Andy Pasztor and Alison Sider
Boeing Co. released internal communications that show employees
displaying a cavalier attitude toward safety, ridiculing regulators
and some airline officials.
The messages revealed how employees persuaded -- and in some
cases tried to trick -- airline and government officials to
conclude that flight simulator training wasn't necessary for the
737 MAX.
Most of the 150 pages of documents were turned over to federal
prosecutors months ago, according to industry and government
officials, and Boeing subsequently sent them to the Federal
Aviation Administration and to House and Senate committees just
before Christmas.
The FAA said nothing in the messages pointed to any new safety
risks that hadn't been identified.
Many documents date from 2017 and 2018 when Boeing was working
on 737 MAX flight simulators. Some exchanges go back as far as
2013, when the plane was in development.
The material was made public Thursday, two days after Boeing
said it would recommend additional simulator training for pilots
when regulators clear the MAX to fly again, reversing its prior
position that computer-based learning would suffice. The names of
pilots were redacted, but some titles were included, in the
documents released late Thursday.
In 2018, as the company was contending with problems in its MAX
flight simulators, some employees were concerned about whether
regulators would sign off on the simulators. Some employees
complained that they had not been given enough time to resolve the
issues.
"Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft?
I wouldn't," one employee wrote in a February 2018 message.
Also that year, one Boeing management pilot told a fellow
employee he was worried about fallout from some of his previous
work that, he seemed to suggest as part of the exchange, resulted
in hiding potential safety issues. "I still haven't been forgiven
by god for the covering up I did last year," the pilot wrote.
"Can't do it one more time. Pearly gates will be closed."
Ridicule of regulators is peppered throughout the documents.
After mentioning unnamed "morons" who decided to put certain kinds
of instrument displays on the MAX, one employee added that India's
top aviation regulator "is apparently even stupider."
The bravado and ridicule also extended to fellow Boeing
employees. "This airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are
supervised by monkeys," another email declared.
The contents, mainly exchanges between company pilots and staff
involved in the MAX simulator, are likely to ratchet up further
criticism of Boeing.
The material comes in the wake of months of escalating
congressional criticism of Boeing's initial design of the MAX,
which has been grounded world-wide since March following a pair of
deadly plane crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
A smaller batch of similar messages, some involving the same
Boeing staff, were released in October and prompted angry responses
from lawmakers, who argued it pointed to major lapses in the plane
maker's safety culture.
The belated release of those earlier documents to the FAA riled
U.S. regulators. Boeing's deteriorating relationship with the FAA
contributed to the ouster of then-Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg
late last year.
Senior FAA officials were concerned that the latest batch of
messages implied that some Boeing employees were willing to
sacrifice safety features to avoid simulator training. Those
officials decided against releasing the messages earlier because
the agency is considering potential enforcement actions against
some of the individuals named in the documents, these officials
said.
"While the tone and content of some of the language contained in
the documents is disappointing, the FAA remains focused on
following a thorough process for returning the Boeing 737 MAX to
passenger service," the agency said.
Several messages relate to problems with Boeing's MAX simulators
in 2017 and 2018 and use "provocative language." They raise
questions about Boeing's interactions with the FAA in connection
with the simulator-qualification process. The company said its
simulators have been looked at several times since the messages
were written and that it is confident they are working
correctly.
"These communications do not reflect the company we are and need
to be, and they are completely unacceptable," the company said. "We
regret the content of these communications, and apologize to the
FAA, Congress, our airline customers, and to the flying public for
them."
Boeing said it hadn't covered up anything and that it was
confident that all MAX simulators are functioning effectively.
Boeing said it released the documents at the urging of
Congressional leaders.
Rep. Peter DeFazio (D., Ore.), chairman of the House
Transportation Committee, described the newly released emails as
"incredibly damning."
"They paint a deeply disturbing picture of the lengths Boeing
was apparently willing to go to in order to evade scrutiny from
regulators, flight crews, and the flying public, even as its own
employees were sounding alarms internally."
Some of the communications stretching back to 2013 -- when
Boeing engineers were firming up design of the MAX -- show pilots
emphasizing that helping airlines avoid costly and time-consuming
simulator sessions for crews trumped safety improvements. The
messages were intended to be confidential.
A feature designed to provide pilots with reliable airspeed in
the event certain sensors malfunction shouldn't be made standard,
one of the messages noted, because "it would likely jeopardize the
Program directive" to avoid extra simulator training for the
MAX.
Venting their frustrations with how the simulator problems were
handled, some employees pointed to what they described as broader
failures of Boeing's leadership.
"I don't know how to fix these things...it's systemic. It's
culture. It's the fact that we have a senior leadership team that
understand very little about the business and yet are driving us to
certain objectives," one wrote in June of 2018.
Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Alison Sider
at alison.sider@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 09, 2020 23:24 ET (04:24 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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