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[narrator] Most people feel comfortable flying.
I would say the majority of people have gotten accustomed
to how safe the system is.
Every day,
tens of thousands of flights,
all over the world.
There's an old saying in aviation,
"If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going."
Boeing has had such a storied history
and such an incredible stature in the industry.
At any given moment,
roughly 10,000 Boeing aircraft are in service
in more than 150 countries.
I've reported on aviation
for more than 20 years at The Wall Street Journal.
Hello there. It's, uh, Andy Pasztor from The Wall Street Journal.
I know that you've been asked not to talk,
but I'm hoping that you can take a few minutes
just to answer some questions.
[Pasztor] By the beginning of 2018,
we'd come through the safest period for commercial aviation
in the history of aviation.
There actually hadn't been a big passenger jet crash
anywhere in the world the previous year.
Boeing has had so much success
producing incredibly safe, reliable aircraft
that pilots and passengers admire and love to fly on.
They had the public's trust.
And then two planes dropped out of the sky.
[solemn instrumental music playing]
[woman] I don't remember the time. I would say quite early in the morning.
It was dark, I remember.
[announcer speaking Indonesian over radio]
[woman] My husband prepared his flight bag,
checked his schedule,
checked out with his colleague that he's flying with.
[teapot whistles]
We had a meal and had a chat for 20, 30 minutes.
That was the normal routine before he left for his flight.
After he left, I went back to sleep,
and after a few hours, I was expecting a call from him.
You know, just normal working day.
[air traffic control] Lion Inter 610 cleared for takeoff, runway 2-5 left
[pilot] Lion Inter 610 cleared for takeoff, 2-5 left.
[airplane engine revving]
-[on-board computer] V1. -[pilot] Noted.
[stick shaker rattling]
[on-board computer] Airspeed low. Airspeed low.
[pilot] Indicated Airspeed Disagree, Captain.
[on-board computer] Airspeed low. Airspeed low.
[pilot] Feel Differential.
[on-board computer] Bank angle. Bank angle. Bank angle.
[pilot] Altitude Disagree, Captain.
[rattling and whirring]
-[air traffic control] Lion Inter 610? -[pilot] We have a flight control problem.
[on-board computer] Terrain. Terrain. Pull up. Pull up.
[on-board computer] Terrain. Terrain.
[pilot] Fly up! Fly up!
[phone ringing]
[woman] I got a call from one of his colleagues,
"We are not able to find his aircraft."
I'm like, "Don't worry." Because I knew… I… I knew my husband.
I knew how he flew.
I was just expecting a call from him.
You know, "I've reached." That was the norm that we used to follow.
So I was expecting that call from him instead of anyone else.
And after that, it's just been… Everyone knows.
[breathes deeply]
[news anchor 1] Lion Air Flight 610 went missing from radar
just a few minutes after taking off from Jakarta.
A brand-new Boeing 737 with 189 people on board
crashing moments after takeoff…
[news anchor 2 speaking Spanish]
[speaking Korean]
[news anchor 3] You mentioned this was a… a Boeing aircraft.
What more do we know about the plane, Benjamin?
Yeah, a Boeing, as you said, uh, almost brand-new.
They had taken delivery of it back in August.
It was a 737 Max. That's the updated version of the 737.
They haven't been out that long.
[indistinct chattering]
[Sethi] That morning,
our families were trying to find out information.
Trying to understand what was going on.
Very soon, everyone there became aware of what had happened.
And that nobody was coming back.
[sobbing]
[Sethi] What I was going through, it was just pain.
I don't remember a thing.
Just except the pain, there was nothing, purely pain.
To my husband,
all that mattered
was the safety and security of his passengers.
He's flying with 188 people along with him.
And the grief that I felt for those families,
unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
[camera shutters clicking]
[Pasztor] In the first day or two days after a crash,
there's really very little information about the cause.
[speaking Indonesian]
In this case, the weather appeared to be good.
It was very close to the airport.
And this is a brand-new plane
built by America's premier aircraft manufacturer.
And unless the black boxes are found quickly,
it's all speculation.
[news anchor] Lion Air has a spotty safety record.
Along with several Indonesian carriers, the low-cost airline was banned
from flying into the United States and Europe
but improved in recent years.
[Sethi] I was following the news,
reading each and every article,
anything that was online.
They all said the same thing.
They started blaming.
There was a blame game going on.
Blaming the country,
blaming the airline,
blaming the pilots,
saying that it was their incompetence.
The airline probably needed to do a better job of making sure its pilots
understood exactly what to do in case the aircraft was performing
in a unique, unusual way and how to get out of the problem.
Should passengers getting on a 737 Max be concerned?
I don't think so. Certainly, in the United States,
they understand how to operate this aircraft.
[man] No one thought it was the airplane.
I am in… in print being asked what this could possibly be and I said,
I would be phenomenally surprised
if it was related to any… any part of the airplane's design.
I mean, it was a Boeing.
[Pasztor] Everyone in the world knew what Boeing stood for.
Their reputation for safety was tremendous.
And at that point,
there really wasn't enough information to draw any conclusions.
But then, the Indonesian investigators found the black boxes.
[man] There are two black boxes, both of which are orange, by the way.
One is called a cockpit voice recorder,
and the other one is called a flight data recorder.
It records the altitude and the airspeed and the direction
and what the throttles are doing.
Thousands of parameters, eight times a second,
so it's a very comprehensive tally of what happened on the airplane.
The flight data recorder showed that right after takeoff,
there was a failure of the left-hand angle-of-attack indicator.
That's a sensor that's located on either side of the airplane
that measures the angle of the nose during flight.
As soon as the faulty angle-of-attack sensors sent
bad data to the aircraft systems,
the stick shaker on the captain's side would have been loudly vibrating
his control column to warn of an impending stall.
But that was a false warning.
The airplane wasn't stalling. It was flying.
[man] Right away, not only did the stick shaker go off,
but there was a master caution light,
airspeed disagree alerts, and the altitude's not reading right.
You have this tidal wave of distraction.
And on top of all that, something was putting
repeated nose-down pressure on the airplane.
These pilots are fighting and are pulling back up on the airplane
and trying to get it to come back up.
But it happens again and drives the nose back down.
So they're having this oscillating battle.
I remember thinking, "What's making that happen?"
[Pasztor] The official response from Boeing was,
we're looking at it, we're cooperating, we don't know quite what happened.
Our sincere apologies to the families. What you would expect.
Dennis Muilenburg, who was chairman, simply said,
"Well, you know, we can't really comment on the investigation."
But we found out that behind the scenes,
Boeing was saying that an American pilot
would never have gotten into this kind of a situation
and that the Indonesian crew didn't do everything they were supposed to do.
[Sethi] I wouldn't say it was racist,
but I actually remember a point
where they spoke about my husband's qualifications.
They wanted to know where he completed his flight training.
In fact, he finished his training in the US.
[Pasztor] By this time, the second week of November…
It's Andy Pasztor from The Wall Street Journal.
…we began asking questions about the design of this aircraft,
rather than the operation of the aircraft.
I'm hoping to talk with you about the 737 investigation.
We could not understand what was going on.
How could a single damaged sensor make the plane behave like this?
[Cox] Finally, Boeing released a statement,
saying it looks like the Lion Air airplane had an erroneous MCAS activation.
And all of us went, "What's an MCAS?"
[Tajer] MCAS? I've never heard of this before.
What is this?
I'm looking through the manual. It was in the abbreviation section.
How could it be in the abbreviations but nowhere else? What is this system?
[man] The MCAS,
or the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System,
really is just some software connected to the angle-of-attack sensors.
Because of the flight characteristics of the new Max,
when certain angle-of-attacks were reached, at certain speeds,
the airplane tended to stall out.
So the MCAS was designed to automatically push the nose back down.
Simple concept.
All they had to do was to add a few lines of code to an existing system.
[Ostrower] MCAS was designed to work in the background,
using the speed trim motor
to swivel the horizontal stabilizer
just a little bit each time it sensed
that the angle-of-attack was… was too high.
It would smoothly bring the nose down.
But in the case of the Lion Air crash,
an angle-of-attack sensor was broken,
which erroneously activated MCAS,
and it activated repeatedly.
Boeing said that the crew did not respond in a way that they expected them to.
They didn't switch the system off.
[Pasztor] The only problem was,
and everybody was completely flummoxed and surprised
when they found out,
Boeing had never told pilots that the MCAS system was on the aircraft.
Say what? [chuckles]
Uh, huh. Uh…
Yeah, I mean, that was my response, like, "What?"
Um, yeah, uh…
[splutters] How… how the heck could this happen?
[Pasztor] Hello there. It's Andy Pasztor from The Wall Street Journal.
Is this a good time to talk?
Good. I just wanted to follow up on our last discussion.
You were nice enough to give me some time, and, uh…
After a lot of knocking on doors,
a very senior Boeing executive
told me, "We never informed the pilots about MCAS."
"We never explained it to them."
"We never trained them on it,
because we didn't want to overwhelm them with information."
That took my colleagues and myself quite aback.
We'd never heard a senior Boeing official
talking along those lines.
Boeing had always prided itself for being the pilot's advocate.
So we wrote a story
saying that Boeing had proactively decided not to tell pilots
about the MCAS system.
New questions this morning for Boeing.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Boeing withheld information
on its 737 model, according to safety experts and others…
[Pasztor] As soon as it became clear that this wasn't an oversight,
this wasn't just left out by accident,
pilots went berserk.
[man] We couldn't believe it.
And once we started learning more about this MCAS system,
it became our number one priority.
I found it disrespectful. Um,
every pilot I ever taught,
I said you want to know as much about your airplane as possible.
[computer trainer] In this series of modules,
we will discuss the differences
between the Boeing 737 NG and 737 Max aircraft.
The 737 Max is the successor to the 737 Next Generation…
[Sethi] Facts should not be hidden from the pilots.
The only training my husband was given
was an iPad training, and it never mentioned MCAS.
[computer trainer] …improvements similar to existing aircraft…
I kept on insisting with the investigators that this aircraft should be grounded.
But Boeing has a big reputation around the world.
[phone ringing]
[Carey] Here's what Boeing did.
They started contacting pilots' unions.
So I got a call saying that Boeing's gonna come down
and brief us on this MCAS system.
This was monumental. It's the first time high-level Boeing executives
have ever come to visit the Allied Pilots Association.
So, on November 27th, I met them at the door.
First of all, they brought their lobbyists.
Who brings a lobbyist to a safety meeting?
I could see that they weren't interested in, uh… in exchanging pleasantries,
so, we went into our conference room.
We all sat down.
I just assumed they were gonna bring PowerPoint presentations,
graphs, charts, data.
And they don't have anything.
It's just them.
I could see that they were worried.
So I taped the meeting.
[pilot 1] These guys didn't even know the damn system was on here.
Nor did anybody else.
[executive] We try not to overload the crews with information
that's unnecessary.
[pilot 2] I would think there would be a priority
on explanations of things that could kill you.
[executive] We take your point. We really do.
[pilot 2] Is there something being done where Boeing might address
ways to make sure it doesn't happen again?
[executive] We're looking at relatively straightforward software changes
that we expect we can get out in a fairly short period of time.
Maybe six weeks.
They've told us at that meeting,
they're gonna have a software fix in six weeks.
Nothing gets done in six weeks.
So we asked, "Why don't you just ground the airplane till you have this fix?"
[executive] 'Cause no one has yet concluded
that the sole cause of this was dysfunction of the airplane.
[Pasztor] They could have grounded the plane,
but Boeing had the stature to say, "This is a terrible thing that happened."
"We're working on it. Trust us."
[news anchor] Joining me right now is the chairman,
president, and CEO of Boeing, Dennis Muilenburg.
-Dennis, it's good to see you. -Good to see you.
Thank you so much for joining us. What can you tell us in terms of
what was told to the pilots and the airlines
about any new equipment in that 737.
We've already issued additional bulletins to our operators and pilots
around the world that point them back to existing flight procedures
to handle that kind of condition.
The bottom line here is the 737 Max is safe.
[news anchor] Our breaking news, an Ethiopian Airlines flight
has crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa,
killing all 157 passengers and crew
thought to be on board.
The airline told…
[man] My wife, Nadia, she stayed up, and at night she would listen to the BBC.
And the BBC said that there was just a…
a crash
of an airplane that had just left Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Our daughter, Samya, had texted us earlier that night to say,
"I just landed in Addis. Just a few more hours and on to Nairobi."
Samya had had a career in public health.
She had been to Africa a couple times before.
You know, it's just another trip.
And, uh, so Nadia woke me up and, uh, said,
"I think Samya was on a plane that just crashed."
And I thought, "That can't be."
"That can't be."
"It can't be her flight."
And then we found out it was… she was on Flight 302.
[exhales deeply] That was her plane.
[woman] Everybody else's dad, you know, drinks alcohol, maybe smokes cigarettes.
My dad was addicted to tea.
He would have 20 cups a day.
He was going back to Kenya
because he wanted to better the community that he grew up in.
He called from the airport, and he just said, you know,
"Hey, Zippy, I just wanted to let you know I'm about to board the flight."
It was about 8:00 p.m. at night,
and I remember I sat on my couch and said, "Okay, Dad."
I just remember he said, "I love you." And I said, you know, "I love you too."
[phone ringing]
The next morning, my phone was ringing,
and it's my brother calling.
And he said, "I need you to brace yourself."
"There's a plane that has crashed in Ethiopia,
and there's a high chance that it's the flight that Dad was on."
And I was like, "Dad never flew on Ethiopian Airlines,
so he definitely wasn't on that plane." And he was like, "No, this time he did."
[Stumo] Nadia said, "We… we have to go there."
So, we drove to JFK
and got on a plane.
When we got to Ethiopia, they wouldn't let people go to the crash site.
So we stayed in Addis Ababa,
as did many other families.
It took us three days to really verify that there just is no…
bodies to recover.
So finally they took us to the crash site.
[all crying]
[Stumo] There was a few plane parts around,
not nearly enough to make up a whole plane.
There were personal things strewn all around the crash site.
Some clothes that were fluttering about.
Some papers fluttering about.
And there was a hole.
The plane went 500, 600 miles an hour
straight into the… straight into the ground.
[sobbing]
[Stumo] I saw people gathered about the crater looking down.
Some brought flowers.
Nadia had brought flowers, roses for Samya Rose and threw them…
threw them in.
[crying]
[Pasztor] Just the idea that a plane within five months, the same plane,
a new plane went down in eerily similar circumstances,
close to the airport, relatively low altitude, not bad weather.
All the obvious reasons that planes would… would… would crash.
Boeing faces a lot of safety questions this morning
because this is the second crash in just five months involving
their best-selling passenger jet.
Major US carriers use this new aircraft.
Hundreds are in service, thousands are on order,
and there are calls this morning to ground all of them.
[Ostrower] Two crashes of brand-new airplanes
within five months of each other.
That doesn't happen in modern aviation.
But Boeing would not publicly consider
that something was… was wrong with the design of the airplane.
There are a lot of passengers who are afraid of the Max.
Again, our commitment to safety is unwavering,
and, uh, we do regret the impact that this has had…
Safety is at the core of who we are at Boeing.
And ensuring safe and reliable travel on our airplanes…
The statement coming from Boeing, "Safety is Boeing's number one priority."
"We have full confidence in the safety of the Max."
"It is also important to note that the Federal Aviation Administration
is not mandating any further action at this time."
[Pasztor] The FAA,
the Federal Aviation Administration,
who's in charge of aviation safety in the US,
had the power to ground the aircraft.
[Cox] The FAA said it was waiting for data,
and until we have that data,
making a decision would be premature.
So they didn't make a decision one way or the other.
[speaking Chinese]
[Pasztor] The day after the crash, the Chinese absolutely floored everyone
when they, on their own, unilaterally ground this aircraft.
[continues speaking Chinese]
And that started a whole series of moves
by other countries.
[news anchor] Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore,
France, Germany, Italy, UK, Ireland, Netherlands.
I could go on.
It does seem like a bit of a rebuke of the FAA.
[woman] If an issue
that affects safety is identified,
the department and the FAA will not hesitate
to take immediate and appropriate action.
[Stumo] To us, to the families of the victims,
it was astounding that the plane was still up in the air,
especially after two crashes.
We turn now to new developments in the deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash.
With a cause still a mystery,
the black boxes are being analyzed in France,
as new details emerge about the flight's final moments.
[Tajer] We're getting more information on the flight path,
and it's looking very similar to the Lion Air crash.
And then in Ethiopia, they found the jackscrew.
Jackscrew is this long screw, about so thick,
that operates the stabilizer trim.
They found the jackscrew in a full nose-down position.
Hands down, it was the MCAS.
Within 30 minutes,
President Trump is on television,
grounding the airplane.
I'm gonna be issuing an emergency order of prohibition
to ground all flights of the 737 Max 8
and the 737 Max 9.
Any plane currently in the air will go to its destination
and thereafter be grounded until further notice.
To my knowledge, it's the only airplane
ever to be grounded by the president of the United States.
But even after the Max was grounded,
and the planes had to be flown to storage facilities,
we had pilots calling to say they don't want to fly them there.
When a pilot doesn't want to fly a brand-new Boeing,
that's an issue.
[man] Two days after the second crash,
I started an investigation.
We knew something big was afoot here,
that this plane appeared to be defective in some manner.
I had just hired my investigative staff, and I said,
"Here's your first job, Boeing 737 Max."
[Pasztor] In addition to Congress trying to get to the bottom of this,
the families of the victims really took this on as a personal issue.
They felt that there needed to be some explanation
of how two planes could have crashed within such a short period of time.
[Stumo] The crash families started coming to DC
to help put pressure on Congress to hold Boeing responsible.
Peter DeFazio, we're indebted to,
because he made this the biggest investigation
in the history of the Transportation Infrastructure Committee.
Paul Njoroge from Kenya lost his wife,
his three children,
and his mother-in-law.
[Sethi] I've been in touch with the crash families,
and we definitely talk about how to go about it
and understand what has to be done to get justice.
This is who we've lost.
This is the cost of doing business as usual.
[Kuria] I remember looking at the full list of passenger names
from so many different countries.
People all over the world have been impacted
by what has taken place.
[speaking Chinese]
[speaking Spanish]
[speaking Swahili]
[speaking French]
[Sethi] We want this thing to come out in the public.
We want Boeing to show all the papers.
We want them to come out with the true facts.
[DeFazio] When we started the investigation,
a lot of people around the world were angry and appalled
at what had been allowed to happen.
Do you feel your story is getting out?
I… right now it is because we're having a hearing.
My concern is that weeks will pass,
and… and the FAA will just put the plane back in the air
without any scrutiny.
They have the power to do that.
[DeFazio] In the United States of America,
Congress has oversight duties,
plain and simple.
And the question was, did Boeing put an unsafe plane in the air?
-[gavel knocking] -[DeFazio] Meeting come to order.
We're here today in response to two catastrophic crashes
that claimed 346 lives in the span of five months.
We're very much in the beginning of, uh, our investigation.
I would like to recognize the family members of those killed,
uh, some of whom are here today,
and we're here to ensure that the lives of your family members
were not lost, uh, in vain and without response.
Today, we'll hear from pilots and other safety professionals
who, uh, work on those planes.
Now, the question is, what were the factors?
[Pasztor] Congress's goal, of course, was first to lay out for the public
what happened and why,
and secondly, to look at legislative changes
that could prevent future crashes.
After the second crash occurred,
Boeing was trying to push the focus onto the Ethiopian pilots.
They acknowledged that MCAS had misfired
but maintained that the Ethiopian crew
did not do everything precisely as they were supposed to.
It was the same argument they used with Lion Air,
and they waged a pretty vigorous public relations campaign
to try to get their point across.
We learned that Boeing's lobbyists were hiring firms in Washington
to spread the message that foreign pilots were to blame.
Captain Carey, uh, Ethiopia Air, the pilot in the right seat
could not fly at our standards here.
We need to look at their pilot qualifications and training.
You know, Ethiopian Airlines flies a plane into, uh, Washington Dulles every day
from Addis Ababa, and they have been doing it for years.
They have a proud aviation culture,
and you have to remember, uh, sir, and members of the panel,
this is a sudden violent and terrifying event.
[congressman] Captain Sullenberger, is it fair to blame these pilots?
I just don't want to take the easy path and blame… blame the pilots.
[Sullenberger] We shouldn't be blaming the pilots,
and we shouldn't expect pilots to have to compensate for flawed designs.
These crews would have been fighting for their lives
in the fight of their lives.
[Pasztor] Soon after the hearings got underway,
we managed to get more information about what actually happened
in the cockpit of the Ethiopian aircraft.
We got the information from the FAA
within hours after they received it from the Ethiopian investigators.
It was very late at night,
and we tried to put together the most comprehensive story we could.
When it came out,
this was the first story that revealed
that the crew, in fact, realized that MCAS had kicked off.
And they did what Boeing instructed them to do.
[Tajer] When the MCAS kicks in,
it runs for ten seconds
and pushes the airplane very powerfully nose-down.
Runs for ten, off for five.
[Cox] They've got this cacophony of stick shaker,
master cautions, airspeed disagree, altitude disagree.
All of these… these warnings going off.
The captain, who's flying the airplane, is trying to figure out what's gone wrong.
[Tajer] The first officer called out, "Stab trim cutout switches, Captain."
I think he said it twice.
He did what Boeing said.
He turned off the MCAS system.
I remember reading that, and I said, "Man, the kid got it right."
"The kid got it right."
[Cox] The problem now is that the airplane is going too fast.
And because of the force on the tail itself,
they cannot manually trim the airplane
to be able to recover.
[warning siren blares]
[on-board computer] Terrain. Terrain. Pull up. Pull up.
[indistinct chattering]
[Pasztor] The pilots in the first crash had no inkling.
Their plane was behaving completely differently
from the way that they had ever seen it, and they didn't know what to do.
In the Ethiopian airplane,
it was a crew that had been briefed by Boeing
on how this MCAS system worked.
And they did what they were supposed to do.
They turned the system off,
and they still crashed.
For Boeing, this was a tremendous problem
and extremely damaging to their reputation.
A reputation that had been years in the making.
[man] My father was a fighter pilot in the Air Force
and an engineer at the Boeing Company.
Boeing was headquartered here in the Pacific Northwest,
and far and away, it was Seattle's biggest employer.
The Boeing pay was good,
so my father was able to provide us a nice house
and, you know, put himself square in the middle of the middle class.
Boeing was an engineering firm first,
and it had always been engineering-led.
By focusing on quality and innovation,
they created the products that made Boeing part of America's pride
and had a tremendous impact on the country's economy.
[Cox] Boeing's signatures are on some of the greatest technical advances made
during the 20th century.
Military airplanes, unmanned vehicles, spacecraft,
and most notably, commercial passenger jets,
starting in the late '50s with the 707.
That was followed by the 727
and then the workhorse of the fleet, the 737.
[woman] There was just amazing engineering
that was coming out of Seattle.
Boeing's history of safety and quality first
was something that the American public came to understand.
People knew that if it's a Boeing plane,
they felt safe.
[Cox] It was the dawn of the Jet Age,
and Boeing excelled at it.
They were cranking out new modern airplanes one after the other.
And then, in the late '60s, Boeing took an almost unimaginable risk.
[announcer] The mostest of everything
describes the new giant of commercial aviation, the jetliner 747.
Contrasted with conventional aircraft, the 747 will carry 490 passengers.
Its engines will be twice as powerful as today's airliners.
The first of these great birds will be delivered by the Boeing Company
to Pan American Airways in 1969.
[Ludtke] The 747 program was a moon shot.
Boeing bet on itself to put together a fantastic airplane.
And they'd said it's gonna be the safest. It's gonna be the most innovative.
It's gonna be the best.
[Cox] The 747 revolutionized air travel.
For the very first time, it became affordable
for people to travel internationally,
and it brought the world closer together.
[Ludtke] The moon shots like the 747
are what put the Boeing Company on the map.
It was, we're gonna do this at all cost. Whatever it costs, we're gonna do it.
[Cole] I worked for the Boeing Company for 32 years.
It was a culture of mutual trust,
and we're in this together, building a quality-engineered product
that makes us all proud.
-[employee] That looks good. -Okay? Thank you.
[man] When I was working for Boeing, they came out with this team-wear for us,
and it had the Boeing logo on it.
You know, and at first, we're like, "Pfft, you know, who wants team-wear?"
But it was amazing when you actually put that shirt on,
and you go out in public.
And I can't tell you how many people that were just, "Oh my God,
you work for Boeing. That is wonderful."
[employee] Looking good, Don.
[Barnett] And it really instilled a lot of pride.
-[employee 1] Perfect! -[employees cheering and clapping]
All right, all right. Good job, you guys!
-[employee 1] There it is, first one. -[employee 2] First one.
I really loved working there because I had a say.
And when something wasn't right,
I could bring it up, and I wasn't afraid of being fired.
Boeing management knew that safety came first,
and if we'd said, "Hey, it's not safe. It's not ready to fly,"
we're… we're not going.
[Barnett] The culture back then was we're all in this together,
and, you know, Boeing's gonna look out for you,
and we expect you to look out for Boeing.
[emcee] Now will you please join me in welcoming
the 777 division vice president and general manager, Alan Mulally.
[crowd cheering]
So, good morning to you all.
[Barnett] There was a sense of belonging and a sense of structure
and a sense of family.
We were a family.
[Mulally] We've come a long way together.
[Barnett] It was an excellent company to work for.
And then, imagine coming into work, and you got a whole new set of bosses,
and everything you've learned in 30 years is now wrong.
Good evening, everyone. It is a multibillion-dollar deal
that is sending shock waves through the aerospace industry.
The planned merger between the Boeing Company
and McDonnell Douglas.
The thought that was going through my head as I walked up here was, "Wow."
I will serve as the chairman and CEO of the company.
Harry Stonecipher will serve as the president
and chief operating officer of the company.
And our intention, like we expect
of everyone in the organization is to work together.
And with that, I'd like to introduce Harry Stonecipher. Harry.
Thank you, Phil.
Ladies and gentlemen…
[man] The 1996 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas by Boeing
was part and parcel of what was happening across the country.
Merger, buyouts, consolidation.
That was the way companies viewed their ability to stay competitive.
Boeing's place in the aviation industry
was preeminent.
They were the gold standard.
They were the people you looked up to for their engineering excellence.
But that began to fall apart when McDonnell Douglas and Boeing merged.
[Ludtke] Harry Stonecipher was the CEO of McDonnell Douglas,
and he ended up the CEO of the Boeing Company.
So, pretty quickly,
McDonnell Douglas became in charge at the very top.
[Goldfarb] This was following on the heels of the 1980s
when cash was king on Wall Street.
You know, uh, "Greed is good."
When Harry Stonecipher took over, he believed that the most important thing
was to take a company and create value on Wall Street.
He said, "Hey, we're in business to make money."
I want to hear about product and margin. I want to hear that it's cost-effective.
[Ostrower] The McDonnell Douglas leadership
took Boeing in a more accelerated direction
toward being a financially driven company.
Wall Street demanded its shareholder returns.
And they wanted Boeing to act like a big industrial company
that delivered those returns.
[Ludtke] Not long after the merger,
there was a major campaign launched
called ShareValue.
And the idea was that they wanted everybody to be aware of the stock price,
and they wanted everybody working together to increase the stock value.
Even the technical meetings,
everything revolved around Boeing stock prices.
To turn around and see the McDonnell Douglas executives
bringing their business plan into the Boeing Company,
that upset a lot of us.
We knew back then that that was a bad plan.
They drove the company as if it was making washing machines, for instance.
[chuckles] Dishwashers.
All the airplanes had to be manufactured more cheaply.
They were reducing the number of people working,
expecting everyone to do more with less.
We saw the company changing before our eyes.
[Cole] You know, I'd been working there in the Seattle area for a long time,
and the environment that we ended up merging with
was so different.
McDonnell Douglas was the good old boys' network.
They weren't respectful of our processes for our employees.
And then we were told they were moving the headquarters to Chicago.
It is official. Boeing is confirming that it's moving
its new international headquarters to Chicago.
And all of us that had been there more than a week was like, "You're crazy."
Because back then, Boeing was Seattle, and Seattle was Boeing. I mean they were…
They were lockstep.
We looked at all the data,
and we believe that Chicago is the best choice for Boeing.
[Ludtke] One of the arguments for moving to Chicago
was to gain separation from the technical people back in Seattle
so that executives could make financial decisions
without as much pushback from, um, engineers.
[Cole] Before McDonnell Douglas, we just didn't take shortcuts
'cause it just wasn't the Boeing culture.
No shortcuts.
You do it right,
and you build in the quality and the safety,
and the profits will follow.
But all that changed,
and it was just heartbreaking.
I think we all tried to appease ourselves by saying,
"Well, maybe we're just upset because it's a change."
But in reality, our gut concerns were really valid at the time.
That… that this was going to affect the company in… in ways
that we couldn't… couldn't even imagine.
It's been a bad year for Boeing
and a better year for its European competitor, Airbus.
For the year, Boeing has 368 new orders,
and Airbus has 427.
By the time that the merger in 1997 happened,
the competition had just chipped away at the market share
that Boeing had fought to acquire over decades.
Boeing found themselves in a very unusual position.
They were being challenged by other manufacturers,
and that pressure was primarily coming from the Europeans,
meaning Airbus.
[Ostrower] Over the years, there has been a lot
of bad blood between Boeing and Airbus.
But here's the thing about Airbus,
it didn't happen overnight
that it became this incredible force in the industry.
It happened one little piece at a time.
It was a slow build,
little by little, little by little,
so that by 2003, Airbus ended up overtaking Boeing's market share.
[Cox] Boeing was behind.
Boeing needed to catch up.
So they started to push even harder to get the airplanes out.
And over time, the laser focus on safety that had been traditional
was compromised.
[woman] My job at Boeing was quality manager.
If something's not right, you need to find it and get it fixed
or get it corrected.
To ensure safety, finding things was what you're supposed to do.
But instead of fixing problems, everything was about speed.
Everything was about getting stuff done. Let's move it. Let's get it done.
You can't stop. You can't slow down.
[Barnett] Used to be when you raise your hand and say,
"We got a problem here,"
they would say, "Yeah, you're right. We're gonna fix it."
After the merger with McDonnell Douglas
and the Airbus coming on,
Boeing quit listening to their employees.
So every time I'd raise my hand and say, "Hey, we got a problem here,"
they would attack the messenger
and… and ignore the message.
[Goldfarb] Historically, Boeing was a culture of telling bad news.
They discussed concerns freely in building planes.
Now it became a problem
that you do not bring bad news to the boss.
Boeing had highly-paid CEOs,
whose main incentive was to increase the stock price
and to please Wall Street.
These CEOs demanded that all their managers hit their marks,
and they don't care how they do that.
[Kitchens] So I guess to speed up production,
they got quality inspectors, quality managers out of the picture.
A mechanic could speed up his job
by doing the work and then just saying to the guy next to him, "Approve this
so that I can move on to the next spot."
[employee] Between me and you,
they didn't put a shim on the landing gear yesterday.
On the lugs. Night shift didn't.
Oh, fuck.
[employee] They said we don't have time to fucking put it on.
[Kitchens] They have, like, one quality person
for almost a whole building on each shift.
We used to have, you know, 15.
[Barnett] I was getting complaints about debris.
Every day, we were finding crap on airplanes that people were leaving.
There was drawings, tools,
fasteners.
There was this one 787,
and after a test flight,
they found a ladder inside the horizontal stabilizer.
All it would have taken was that ladder to fall up against the jackscrew assembly,
and that… that plane would have been history.
[Kitchens] These are pictures of metal shavings in wire bundles.
These shavings can cause a… a fire or a short.
And these aircraft fly by wire,
so if you have a… a short,
it could cause malfunctions in your instruments,
in your landing gear. I mean, everything that runs by wire would be affected.
[Goldfarb] Boeing whistleblowers have said
that anybody that reported a problem at the South Carolina plant
was either fired
or let go or moved on.
[Barnett] My pay was docked for putting quality concerns in writing.
They told us flat out they do not want anything in documentation
so they can maintain culpable deniability.
They don't want anything documented.
[DeFazio] There are a lot of questions that still remain unanswered,
and Boeing has yet to provide a single document.
I'm hoping they will provide the documents we've requested voluntarily,
uh, and in the not-too-distant future.
[DeFazio] From the start of the investigation,
Boeing has been very difficult to deal with
in terms of interviews and/or documents.
They have essentially ignored
the families of the victims.
[Kuria] Boeing has never reached out to us directly.
It communicates their lack of remorse, their lack of accountability.
And that's infuriating.
For them, it was business as usual.
But we're the ones who were trying to make sure that
other families never have to deal with what we're dealing with.
[Stumo] We've met with, I don't know, 55 congressmen and women and senators.
It's hard.
You go, and you relive this 55 times in a row
and talk about your daughter dying.
When we held up pictures of our lost loved ones
in the hearing room, we were told, "You're not supposed to do that."
"They're like protest signs."
And we said, "They're not protest signs."
"They're our loved ones."
I personally have probably been at s… seven hearings.
Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to testify today.
My name is Ed Pierson.
I believe production problems at the Renton Factory
may have contributed to these two tragic crashes.
I formally warned Boeing leadership in writing on multiple occasions,
specifically once before the Lion Air crash
and again before the Ethiopian Airlines crash.
Those warnings were ignored. On June 9th…
[Stumo] We've heard lots of testimony about the 737 Max,
but the committee wanted actual documents from Boeing.
No documents had been received, nothing.
[DeFazio] We fully expect at a future hearing
to have Boeing into this committee,
uh, once we have, uh, the documentation digested
that we need to ask the meaningful, very pointed questions we will ask.
I was really frustrated. I thought that Boeing was dragging its feet.
When will you talk to Boeing as part of your ongoing investigation?
I really, uh, want to have documents from Boeing
before I call them as a witness so we get the meaningful information we want
and not just a pile of stuff this high.
[Pasztor] Congress expected answers.
The families of the victims expected answers.
But Boeing actively tried to keep emails and documents
and internal memos out of the public domain.
You know, they say aircraft crashes are a combination of events
that all come together uniquely.
In this case, one of those events
was back when Boeing lost its competitive edge.
These days, Boeing finds itself facing turbulence
caused not by the weather
but by a foreign rival with some very big ambitions.
[news anchor] Airbus now leads the world in building commercial airplanes,
a big stick in the eye to America and to the Boeing Corporation.
[Goldfarb] In the 2000s, Airbus was on a roll.
They had several years of selling more planes than Boeing.
And that raised eyebrows.
[news anchor] In 1999, Boeing delivered 620 planes.
Last year, 285.
[Michael Goldfarb] And then, in 2010,
Airbus introduced the A320neo.
For carriers, the ultimate goal, of course, is maximum fuel efficiency.
A big part of an airline's cost is what they paid for fuel.
[Ostrower] Oil prices had gone to record levels.
Airlines were saying, "We need fuel efficiency, and we need it now."
And Airbus delivered.
The 320neo.
You scored an absolute home run
by making that decision to get out there and offer it before Boeing.
No airplane in aviation history has ever sold so quickly and so well.
Back in Chicago, the neo sent Boeing into a panic
because they didn't have a plane ready to compete.
[Pasztor] Boeing thought about a new aircraft,
but the price tag would have been significant.
And they didn't have the luxury
of taking seven, eight, ten years to develop a brand-new plane.
So instead, they decided to put more fuel-efficient engines
on the existing 737 model.
[woman] We are making a decision
to invest in the 737 family.
We are announcing the 737 Max.
The 737 Max gives our airline customers
the most efficient airplane
in the single-aisle segment.
[Ludtke] We were disappointed. We wanted a new airplane.
We really believed the 37 had… was long in the tooth and had…
We had squeezed as much as we possibly could from that airplane.
I mean, the design was over 40 years old.
[Pasztor] The 737 had been flying for more than four decades,
and different versions of them had been developed.
A little bit better of an engine,
digital cockpits,
a little longer.
The 737 Max was seen as a slightly updated,
more fuel-efficient version of the same plane.
For a manufacturer,
the advantage of these derivatives,
as they're called,
was they required less time to get approved by the FAA.
And the added benefit to the airlines
was you might not need any additional pilot training.
[Ludtke] Training pilots is a major cost of operating an airline.
Despite how expensive the airplanes are, it's the people that cost the most.
And training pilots is a major piece of that pie.
[Goldfarb] If the Max turned out to be too different from the existing 737,
that would have triggered immediately
an FAA red flag.
And simulator training would be required fleet-wide
for all Max pilots.
[Pasztor] We're talking about devoted simulator training,
taking pilots off the flight line,
not having them fly passengers.
Getting them to come into a training center
and sit for, whatever, two days in a simulator.
[Ludtke] So when Boeing was designing the Max,
in order to remain competitive,
they made guarantees to the airlines
that their pilots wouldn't need simulator training.
[Ostrower] The strategy worked,
and the 737 Max sold phenomenally well.
Boeing got orders for hundreds and hundreds of airplanes.
[man] This is the largest firm order that we've ever gotten,
in terms of number of airplanes and also the value of this deal.
So, truly another historical day for us.
[Ludtke] Boeing thought that they could do this project
very quickly and very cheaply.
That it wouldn't take much effort.
They just thought a little bit of tweak to the structure,
and you can stick an engine on there and lengthen the landing gear,
and you're good to go.
And because there could be no additional pilot training,
there was tons of motivation within the company
to either build a design that doesn't have significant differences
or potentially to cover up a design that does.
[DeFazio] We had to go through very lengthy negotiations with Boeing
to receive documents.
We had engaged the House attorneys here,
and then we finally started getting
the first of the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that they gave us.
And my investigative staff
started going through it.
Virtually everything was stamped "proprietary,"
and it took quite some time to come to an agreement
so we could reveal the contents of those documents.
And I think the reason is because they are so damning on their face.
In that massive tranche of documents,
one was particularly telling.
We found out that a group of Boeing employees
had held a meeting and discussed the MCAS system.
This memo, discovered by the committee, and this is early on
in the development of the aircraft,
revealed that the MCAS system was a problem for Boeing
from the very beginning.
[DeFazio] Back in 2013,
when Boeing was just starting to build the Max,
they were re-engining a 45-year-old airframe
with these giant, new fuel-efficient engines.
Because these engines are bigger,
they had to be positioned further forward and higher up on the wings.
And so Boeing was worried about the plane
getting into, uh, too much of a nose-up,
and then the plane could stall.
So, if it starts to pitch up,
MCAS was designed to help the pilot level the plane out.
[Pasztor] The problem was MCAS was a significant new system
and could prompt the FAA to require some additional training.
So, what's the solution in th… in this memo?
[DeFazio] They said, "If we emphasize MCAS is a new function,
there may be greater certification and training impact."
Everybody at Boeing knew you can't have pilot retraining.
No matter what we do, no matter how we change this plane,
we've gotta pretend it's the same plane as the predecessor.
[Pasztor] So they decided,
"Externally, we would communicate it is an addition to Speed Trim."
Speed Trim is the existing system, which pilots had already been trained on.
"Internally continue using the acronym MCAS."
They determined that they would conceal the existence
to anybody, uh, outside of Boeing of the MCAS system.
[Pasztor] Once these documents became public, it showed
that there were major, big issues broiling under the surface
and a widespread pattern inside Boeing of deceitful behavior.
This next piece of evidence was one of the most important specific documents
relating to the design of the plane and of the MCAS system.
It shows that MCAS changed over the course of the design.
Boeing didn't end up with the same system that they started out with.
To begin with, it became much more powerful.
[Ostrower] It wasn't until Boeing got into flight testing that they realized
that they actually had to expand how the MCAS system worked.
They thought at first that it was only gonna be for when the airplane
was at high speeds.
But what became clear was that the Max needed MCAS
when the airplane was flying at low speeds as well.
And it was this transition to low-speed handling
that made the system far more significant.
The result was is that MCAS gained more power.
So it had the ability to make larger movements
of the horizontal stabilizer,
which could push the nose of the airplane down very quickly.
[Pasztor] In addition to this increased power of the system,
there was a second change, something even more problematic.
Boeing changed the MCAS system to only use one sensor instead of two.
[DeFazio] It turns out this way more powerful system
was controlled by just one angle-of-attack sensor.
The MCAS system is safety-critical.
And on an airplane, you never ever have
a safety-critical system that has a single point of failure.
[Carey] The angle-of-attack sensors
protrude out of either side of the fuselage, near the cockpit.
If a happy-birthday Mylar balloon
gets stuck on that vane, it becomes unreliable.
Believe it or not, we hit balloons, we hit birds,
uh, and all of these things, uh, are not uncommon.
[DeFazio] If that sensor is damaged or faulty,
it will send a wrong message to the MCAS system,
which then tries to take over the plane from the pilots.
[Reed] None of this was communicated by anybody at Boeing
to the FAA engineer who was in charge of oversight,
and yeah, it should have been.
[Ostrower] The FAA was kept out of the loop.
Usually, there's a constant negotiation
between… between a regulator and the regulated
about what parts of the airplane are gonna change.
[DeFazio] But in the case of Boeing,
they had a culture of concealment,
deliberate concealment regarding the MCAS system.
And the evidence kept mounting.
[Ludtke] Coordination sheets are technical documents
written to archive information.
This coord sheet is capturing the history of MCAS.
[Pasztor] This is basically about the safety issues
that were analyzed inside Boeing,
and the most relevant part of this dealt
with how quickly pilots would be able to react
if the system went haywire.
[Ludtke] I haven't seen this particular coord sheet before.
Hmm.
With pilot training to recognize the runaway,
a reaction time scenario greater than ten seconds
found the failure to be catastrophic.
[Carey] So if you don't respond
in less than ten seconds to this situation,
you can't recover.
Ten seconds,
which is ridiculous.
[Ludtke] But the problem here is not just the reaction time.
The problem here is the term "pilot training."
It says, "With pilot training to recognize the runaway,"
they're saying that we can't just throw pilots at this
without awareness of the system.
And… which… which that's the real "gotcha" right in this statement.
Pilots need to be trained on MCAS to potentially avoid killing people.
And Boeing knew that this was the case.
And yet pilot training never happened.
[keyboard clacking]
Our reporting and the memos and documents that had been released
revealed an underbelly, an underside of the company.
In this March 28, 2017, internal Boeing communication,
the chief technical pilot for the 737 Max writes,
"I want to stress the importance of holding firm
that there will not be any type of simulator training required."
"Boeing will not allow that to happen."
"We'll go face-to-face with any regulator who tries to make that a requirement."
The tragedy of it is,
some of these emails were actually conversations with Lion Air.
In a June 6, 2017 email exchange,
which took place the year before the crash,
Lion Air says, in effect, wouldn't it be better,
wouldn't it be safer to have some additional training?
We want more than you're… you're recommending.
And Boeing writes, flat out, "There is absolutely no reason
to require a Max simulator to begin flying the Max."
If they had said what the true power of MCAS was,
simulator training would be required fleet-wide for all 737 Max pilots.
Instead, Boeing literally mocked Lion Air,
mocked them for wanting to have simulator training.
[DeFazio] Boeing had to, you know, berate them.
"You cannot have simulator training."
"You can't do it. It costs money. We lose money."
They talked about Jedi-mind tricking regulators around the world
into adopting the standard of no simulator training required.
So, we're supposed to react in less than ten seconds
to a system that's never been on any airplane we've ever flown before.
Boeing knew pilots had a monster waiting for them
in the MCAS system,
but they conspire to not offer training.
It's just
unconscionable to me.
[splutters] It just…
It's nuts.
[Pasztor] In the end, Boeing succeeded,
and when the plane was delivered to airlines,
it didn't appear from the outside
that there was something fundamentally wrong with the aircraft.
I mean, they were making sales all over the world.
[camera shutters clicking]
[crowd applauding]
[Ostrower] Boeing sold over 5,000 Maxes.
It's an unbelievable number.
It really was the product that brought the financial performance
on Wall Street up to a… a level that Boeing had never seen before.
[Goldfarb] Boeing's profit soared.
The stock value went through the roof.
And that was the whole idea.
Performance was being judged in quarterly returns,
and the Max delivered.
The 737 Max was going to be the major meal ticket for Boeing
for coming decades.
This is a company that, yeah, 500's a reasonable number.
[Pasztor] And it was seen as a sure thing.
[crowd cheering]
[executive] Unprecedented value for our customers,
in terms of saving fuel, in terms of being reliable,
in terms of being maintainable.
And you know what we've done? We've created an airplane
that's gonna exceed their expectations by any way you measure it.
[Ostrower] Everyone thought that the good times would never end.
And then, in October of 2018, they did.
[Pasztor] The Lion Air pilots not only didn't know
how this system worked,
they didn't know the name of the system.
They didn't even know that the MCAS system was on the aircraft.
[Carey] You just got the airplane into the air, and all of a sudden, bang,
all these bells and warnings and whistles and stick shaker going off.
[on-board computer] Airspeed low.
[Sullenberger] An angle-of-attack sensor, which had either failed or was damaged,
was sending a bad input to the cockpit.
It would have taken more than a few seconds certainly
for the pilots to determine what the cause was.
And then as soon as the flaps were retracted,
MCAS was activated.
You started the clock, right?
One Mississippi, two Mississippi,
three Mississippi…
[warning siren blares]
[Sullenberger] The way MCAS kept pushing the nose of the airplane down
was maniacal.
And the pilots never understood
it was trying to kill them.
[on-board computer] Terrain. Terrain. Pull up. Pull up.
[Carey] You've got ten seconds,
which is impossible.
So basically, ten seconds, you're dead.
[on-board computer] Terrain. Terrain. Pull up. Pull up.
[crew speaking Indonesian]
[Sethi] We now know that within few days of the crash,
Boeing knew what the problem was.
They knew what he had faced,
what my husband had to go through in that flight.
Boeing knew what the problems were with MCAS.
It's not that they were not aware of it.
There should be a sense of responsibility.
[Pasztor] Here in the US,
they never seriously considered grounding the aircraft.
After the first crash,
Boeing was all about,
how can we justify keeping the planes flying?
[DeFazio] We didn't know at the time that after the Lion Air crash,
the FAA had done a very technical analysis
called a TARAM.
[Stumo] TARAM. T-A-R-A-M.
A Transport Aircraft Risk Assessment Methodology.
They've projected that there could be, without a fix,
15 more crashes
of this aircraft during its life.
[Pasztor] They projected that there could be as many as one fatal crash
every two years of a Max.
That would make the Max the most dangerous modern jet ever built.
At the time, nobody heard about this report.
It wasn't made public.
But we verified that Boeing knew about the results
at the same time that the FAA knew about them.
Boeing argued that it's never possible
to actually predict the timing of another crash
and that they would have a software fix
developed and tested and implemented very quickly.
And in the end, the FAA accepted Boeing's argument.
[DeFazio] There were people, a few people, at Boeing who rang alarm bells,
but they were ignored.
Up there in the executive offices,
they were watching the stock price and calculating their bonuses.
[Stumo] Just six weeks after the Lion Air crash,
the Boeing board decided to increase stock buybacks
and increase dividends.
Total disregard for what happened.
All of our customers are flying all of their Maxes daily around the world.
The airplane is safe, and we're very confident in that.
It's the corporate culture that they had built up.
It was their greed.
Are the profits more important than the human life?
[crowd speaking Indonesian]
[crying]
[Stumo] You know, once they got the TARAM report,
Boeing should have grounded the Max.
They didn't do that.
This was after the Lion Air crash,
before my daughter died.
They let it go up in the air.
[Pasztor] I think that is the most disturbing
and most revealing part of the whole story.
Boeing did the absolute least that they could do
to cope with this situation. The absolute minimum.
Basically, they were betting that the problem would not reoccur
before a permanent fix could be implemented.
And of course that turned out to be a fatal mistake.
It's just a horrible, horrible story.
[indistinct chattering]
[Stumo] Boeing's failure to do everything they could do
to prevent the second crash made our lives miserable.
And this isn't just about Samya and our family.
It's about everybody that died on those planes.
And so, in October of 2019,
when Muilenburg was scheduled to testify
at the Senate hearing,
we were all highly motivated to be there.
Muilenburg walks in,
and for a moment,
he glanced at us, at the families,
but he never really looked at us.
A lot of the testimony that day was about the internal Boeing communications.
You're the CEO. The buck stops with you.
Did you read this document?
And how did your team not run in with their hair on fire,
saying, "We got a real problem here."
Senator, when I was made aware of the existence of this kind of document,
I relied on our counsel to provide that to the appropriate authorities.
[Cruz] How did you not say,
"We need to figure out exactly what happened,
not after all the hearings, not after the pressure,
but because people have died and we don't want another person to die."
Senator, as… as you mentioned, uh… uh,
I didn't, uh, see the details of this exchange until recently.
[Stumo] Our family at that time still had heard nothing from Boeing.
We had heard Dennis Muilenburg
apologize to cameras
but never to us.
We began work on an MCAS software update in that time frame.
[Stumo] When Senator Blumenthal's time came to question,
he asked the family members to stand up
and hold their loved ones' pictures.
To the relatives who have lost loved ones,
if you could please stand.
[Stumo] And at that point,
Dennis Muilenburg had to turn around and look at us.
[emotional music playing]
[DeFazio] In the 21st century,
to lose two planes within months of each other
and kill so many people,
it just never ever ever should have happened.
The safety culture at Boeing fell apart.
It was corrupted from the top down
by pressures from Wall Street, plain and simple.
[DeFazio] Mr. Muilenburg,
we have seen that, you know, pressures from Wall Street
have a way of influencing the decisions of the best companies in the worst way,
endangering the public, jeopardizing the good work
of countless, countless hardworking employees
on the factory lines.
And I hope that's not the story that is ultimately, uh, gonna be written
about this long-admired company.
[Pasztor] I've thought about this story a lot
in terms of what it means and what it will mean.
Some of the mistakes that Boeing made were irreparable.
The people who died and their families and their friends
and the lives that ended in tragedy,
those can never be repaired.
How many times have you heard companies say,
"We're committed to excellence."
"We're committed to safety. We're committed to our customers."
But no matter how big the company is and how sophisticated
and what a fantastic past it had, which is all true for Boeing,
we should be skeptical.
All of us should be skeptical.
The Boeing 737 Max planes now back in the air.
Flight happening today for the first time in nearly two years
after the planes, they were grounded
following two fatal crashes that killed hundreds of people.
[news anchor] Yesterday, we spoke exclusively with Dave Calhoun,
the president and CEO of Boeing.
[Calhoun] We don't want to hide anything because we're proud of what we do.
The products that we make are incredible. They're good for humanity.
And I'm very proud of our team, and I'm very proud of that airplane.
It is a, uh, remarkable machine
and as safe as anything… anything in the air.
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[solemn music playing]