‘Designed by clowns’: Boeing releases flood of troubling internal documents related to 737 Max

By Chris Isidore and Ross Levitt, CNN Business

Updated 3:17 PM ET, Fri January 10, 2020

New York (CNN Business)Boeing (BA) employees ridiculed the 737 Max’s regulatory certification progress and crudely expressed doubts about the plane’s ability to fly safely, according to a trove of newly released internal documents.

The company on Thursday sent the documents — more than 100 pages in all — to the House and Senate committees that have been probing its design of the troubled 737 Max plane, which was grounded last March after two fatal crashes that claimed 346 lives.

Many of the pages detail internal communications shared by Boeing employees while 737 Max simulators were developed and certified in 2017 and 2018. Some messages also date back to 2013. The records don’t include the names of the employees, and it is not always clear when some exchanges happened, since some emails contain conversations that appear to have happened over a separate, instant messaging system. But the exchanges represent a damaging account of what some within the company at the time thought of the planes as they achieved certification and began entering service.

“Honesty is the only way in this job — integrity when lives are on the line on the aircraft and training programs shouldn’t be taken with a pinch of salt,” wrote one Boeing worker to another in messages that were emailed in February 2018. “Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.”

Continued

PolarParty

Article URL : https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/09/business/boeing-documents/index.html