Boeing employees knew about problems with flight simulators for the now-grounded 737 Max and apparently tried to hide them from federal regulators, documents released on Thursday showed.
In internal messages, Boeing employees talked about misleading regulators about problems with the simulators. In one exchange, an employee told a colleague they would not let their family fly on a 737 Max.
Boeing said the statements “raise questions about Boeing’s interactions with the FAA [US Federal Aviation Administration]” in getting the simulators qualified, but said the company is confident that they work properly.
Photo: AFP
“These communications do not reflect the company we are and need to be, and they are completely unacceptable,” Boeing said in a statement.
Employees also groused about Boeing’s senior management, the company’s selection of low-cost suppliers and wasting money.
“I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year,” one employee wrote in a message in 2018 in reference to dealing with the FAA.
“I know, but this is what these regulators get when they try and get in the way. They impede progress,” another wrote in August 2015.
“This airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” said another employee in 2017, apparently in reference to the FAA.
“Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t,” an employee wrote to a colleague.
“No,” the colleague answered.
Names of the employees who wrote the e-mails and text messages were redacted.
The 737 Max has been grounded worldwide since March, after two crashes that killed 346 people.
Boeing is still working to update software and other systems on the plane to convince regulators to let it fly again. The work has taken much longer than Boeing expected.
The latest batch of internal Boeing documents were provided to the FAA and US Congress last month, and released on Thursday.
The company said it was considering disciplinary action against some employees.
FAA spokesman Lynn Lunsford said that the agency found no new safety risks that have not already been identified as part of its review of changes that Boeing is making to the plane.
He said that the simulator mentioned in the documents has been checked three times in the past six months.
“Any potential safety deficiencies identified in the documents have been addressed,” he said in a statement.
A lawmaker leading one of the congressional investigations into Boeing called the documents “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,” said US Representative Peter DeFazio, chairman of the House of Representatives Transportation Committee.
DeFazio said the documents detail “some of the earliest and most fundamental errors in the decisions that went into the fatally flawed aircraft.”
DeFazio and other critics have accused the company of putting profit over safety.
The grounding of the 737 Max is to cost the company billions of dollars in compensation to families of passengers killed in the crashes and airlines that canceled thousands of flights.
Last month, the company ousted chief executive Dennis Muilenburg and decided to temporarily halt production of the plane, a decision that is rippling out through its supplier network.
Additional reporting by AFP
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