Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing - Softcover

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PETER ROBISON is an investigative journalist for Bloomberg and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award, the Malcolm Forbes Award, and four “Best in Business” awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. A native of St. Paul, Minnesota, with an honors degree in history from Stanford University, he lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife and two sons. 

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The Incredibles

Boeing occupies what feels like a city of its own to the south of Seattle. The company’s footprint stretches more than a mile along East Marginal Way, the comically understated name for a street where so much of consequence has taken place for a century. Today there’s a county airport known as Boeing Field; a museum that displays the original humpbacked 747; an aviation-focused high school funded by Boeing (instead of the ubiquitous 12 signs signaling support of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, students there hang a √144); and block-long buildings where engineers and mechanics test and develop aircraft like the MAX. One massive building, in fact, was camouflaged as a town during World War II, when Boeing churned out bombers crucial to the war effort. Fake suburban streets were built atop the roof to confuse potential aerial attackers, complete with wooden houses and trees made from wires and chicken feathers.

War was actually the reason the American company would go on to dominate the jet age that brought international travel to the masses in the decades that followed. Days after Germany’s surrender in May 1945, a Boeing engineer named George Schairer sent a letter from a forest near the town of Braunschweig. Schairer had joined a team of civilian advisers working with U.S. Army intelligence there to examine the research files of the Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring Aeronautical Research Institute. What he saw stunned him. The Germans, he realized, understood far more than anyone else about the potential of mating jet engines to swept-back wings. Most planes at the time still used propellers and perpendicular wings, jutting out from the fuselage at ninety-degree angles. Wind tunnel data that Schairer examined in the files showed a massive increase in speed and performance when wings were made to point slightly back, particularly when the engines hung beneath the wings in pods rather than being nested inside them, as had been the custom. The arrangement compensated for drag by making the wing itself more flexible in meeting wind resistance. Schairer sent seven cramped pages of mathematical formulas and sketches to a colleague in Seattle.

The timing was good; Boeing was then in the midst of a competition with three other manufacturers to build a jet-powered bomber for the U.S. Army Air Forces. The others soon got access to the same German data, but they all opted for fixed-wing designs, and Boeing won the contract for the B-47, whose mission was the rapid delivery of nuclear bombs to targets in the Soviet Union.

At $3 million apiece, the B-47 was the most expensive plane Boeing had ever built when it entered production in 1951. More importantly, the contract would give Boeing a crucial head start in technology that could serve as the basis of long-distance travel for generations to come--if the company chose to take such a gamble.

Boeing’s president, William Allen, didn’t have the appearance of a bold man of action. Before taking the top job in 1945, he’d been the company’s chief lawyer and a board member for fifteen years. He never traveled without Triscuits and two pairs of eyeglasses. The night he became president, he jotted a series of resolutions into his diary. Among the promises he made to himself, in addition to daily sit-up exercises: “Be considerate of my associates’ views”; “Don’t talk too much, let others talk”; “Make a sincere effort to understand labor’s viewpoint”; and “Develop a postwar future for Boeing.”

Douglas Aircraft, in Long Beach, California, was then the acknowledged king of the skies. Since before the war, the propeller-driven DC-3 had been the backbone of commercial airline fleets, carrying as many as thirty-two people in graceful silvery skins that reflected the age’s Art Deco aesthetic. The conditions inside were less graceful--bumpy, noisy, and, during storms, wet (the windows leaked). A cross-country flight took fifteen hours with three refueling stops. Douglas sold more than six hundred of them--trouncing a competing Boeing model eight to one--and during the war the United States ordered ten thousand copies of a military version. The California company had more of the same on its drawing boards--propeller-driven planes that were a bit larger, a bit faster, and a bit longer range.

Boeing was merely one among many airplane manufacturers in a business where gold-rush opportunity mingled with high risks. The youthful companies were controlled by dominant, strong-willed founders like Donald Douglas in Los Angeles, Glenn Martin in Baltimore, and James McDonnell in St. Louis.

Bill Boeing had been one, too. A wealthy timber heir who also owned a shipyard, he and a friend, a naval officer named Conrad Westervelt, got their first taste of flight at a 1914 Fourth of July fair on Seattle’s Lake Washington. They took turns climbing into the open cockpit of a barnstormer’s rickety seaplane, donning goggles to cruise a thousand feet over the hourglass of land between the lake and Elliott Bay. Afterward, Boeing, who’d studied engineering at Yale University, told Westervelt, also an engineer: “There isn’t much to that machine. I think we could build a better one.”

Boeing took flying lessons at Martin’s school and bought his own Martin seaplane for $10,000. Flying it over Seattle, he tossed out missile-shaped leaflets urging military preparedness as the Great War raged in Europe. With help from a pontoon builder at his shipyard and others they hired, Boeing and Westervelt assembled the B&W Model 1, a seaplane made of spruce and Irish linen. Boeing took it out himself on June 15, 1916, taxiing to the center of Seattle’s Lake Union and gunning the 125-horsepower engine. The plane skipped and threw spray before lifting into straight flight for a quarter mile. The navy transferred Westervelt back to the East Coast later that summer, but Boeing incorporated his Pacific Aero Products Company and converted part of his shipyard on the Duwamish River south of the city into its base of operations. In a wooden hangar--the famous “Red Barn” preserved in the museum near Boeing Field--some one hundred designers and carpenters worked on drafting tables and sawhorses to make an improved version of the Model 1.

The navy placed an order, the start of a rewarding relationship with the government that led to bombers and, finally, airmail contracts that were the industry’s bread and butter in those days before passenger travel was widely accepted. By 1928, almost one-third of U.S. airmail was carried by Boeing Air Transport, and the following year Boeing merged all of his interests--by then including the engine maker Pratt & Whitney and the airline United Air Lines--into a single entity called the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation.

The vertically integrated juggernaut was not to be. Airmail contracts became an early target of President Franklin Roosevelt’s new Democratic administration in 1933, and congressional investigators probed allegations of collusion in awarding them. Boeing himself was grilled for six hours by Senator Hugo Black of Alabama, later one of the longest-serving Supreme Court justices. In that miserable Depression year, with unemployment at 25 percent, Black made Boeing read out the profits from every sale of shares he’d made and the executive salaries at each...