Internal Boeing messages say 737 Max ‘designed by clowns’

Bloomberg

Boeing Co employees expressed alarm with the 737 Max and the flight simulators used to train pilots on the new jetliner while also mocking senior managers and regulators, in a trove of messages released by the manufacturer.
“This airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” said one company pilot in messages to a colleague in 2016. The company provided the documents in December to lawmakers and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), who are investigating the 737 Max and the process that cleared it to fly.
The internal communications threaten to upend Boeing’s efforts to rebuild public trust in the 737 Max, which has been grounded since March after two crashes that killed a total of 346 people. That will add to the hurdles for David Calhoun, a longtime board member who will take over on January 13 as CEO after Dennis Muilenburg was ousted last month.
“These newly released emails are incredibly damning,” said US Representative Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat who chairs a committee that is investigating Boeing and the Max.
“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,” DeFazio said in a statement.
Boeing, which provided the documents under pressure from US lawmakers, apologised and said it was committed to “full transparency” with the FAA.
“These documents do not represent the best of Boeing,” Greg Smith, the company’s interim CEO, said to employees. “The tone and language of the messages are inappropriate, particularly when used in discussion of such important matters, and they do not reflect who we are as a company or the culture we’ve created.”
The FAA said it has reviewed the Boeing messages and found that “nothing in the submission pointed to any safety risks that were not already identified as part of the ongoing review of proposed modifications to the aircraft.”
Southwest Airlines Co, the largest Max operator, called the messages “disappointing,” but said it remained confident in the work Boeing has done since the statements were made.
“As we’ve shared previously, we will not introduce the Max back into our fleet until it’s safe to fly,” said Brandy King, a spokeswoman for Southwest.

Simulator Reversal
The Boeing documents — consisting of more than 100 pages of messages, emails and memos — were released days after the company reversed its earlier opposition to requiring Max pilots to undergo simulator training before the grounded plane resumes commercial flight.
One of the company’s big selling points with customers had been that pilots certified for an earlier generation of 737 jets only needed a short computer course to brush up their skills for the Max. Those assurances helped make the Max Boeing’s best-selling jetliner.
The messages shared by the company at times reveal the pressure on employees — and customers — to avoid the additional training. They also highlighted the technical glitches that bedeviled Max simulators after the jet began flying commercially in mid-2017.
Boeing said that “any potential safety deficiencies identified in the documents have been addressed.” In one exchange about the Max flight simulators, an employee said, “honesty is the only way in this job — integrity when lives are on the line on the aircraft and training programmes shouldn’t be taken with a pinch of salt. Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.”