Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
by Peter Robison
View on GoodreadsPeter Robison's institutional history of Boeing's transformation from engineer-led aerospace company into a financialized firm — and the 737 MAX disasters (Lion Air 2018, Ethiopian 2019) as the foreseeable result of that transformation.
Core ideas
- The 1997 McDonnell Douglas "reverse merger" is the book's load-bearing event — McDonnell Douglas was financially weaker but its executives took over Boeing's culture, importing cost-cutting and stock-buyback priorities over engineering ones.
- The MCAS system (the automated pitch-control software implicated in both crashes) was developed in a culture that had already lost the engineer-veto authority that would have caught the design problem earlier.
- FAA capture is the parallel story — the agency's "delegated authority" relationship with Boeing meant Boeing was effectively certifying itself, with safety-margin consequences that compounded for two decades before the planes started falling.
Published2021
Pages336
ISBN9780385546492
ReadDec 2024
