Wednesday 6 November 2019

Boeing needs a new boss


Full article on guardian.co.uk

Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing’s chief executive, last week told US lawmakers that he would have grounded the 737 Max in a heartbeat – if only he’d known about the dangers posed by the aircraft’s anti-stall mechanism. His apparent ignorance of this design flaw led to the deaths of 189 people in October 2018, when Lion Air Flight 610 slammed into the Java Sea. Five months later, once Boeing had convinced most of the world that poorly trained Indonesian pilots were probably to blame for the disaster, another 157 people died on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.

To the ordinary person in the street, glaring similarities between the crashes – both of which involved the same, brand new aircraft type nosediving at the same stage of their flight – made it obvious that the 737 Max should be grounded...