What Boeing Knew

Oct 31, 2019

In testimony before a House committee on Wednesday, Dennis A. Muilenburg, Boeing’s chief executive, said, “If we knew everything back then that we know now, we would have made a different decision.” Congress is investigating two crashes of Boeing 737 Max jets which killed 346 people, cost the company billions of dollars and raised new questions about government oversight of aviation. So what did Boeing executives know about the dangers of the automated system implicated in the crashes — and when did they know it? Guest: Natalie Kitroeff, who covers the economy for The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. 

Background reading:   

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from The New York Times unlikable borrow this is the daily

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today in testimony before Congress the chief executive of Boeing said quote if we knew everything back then that we know now we would have made a different decision so what did Boeing Executives know and when did they know it

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it's Thursday October 31st

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so Natalie for the past six months we have been talking to you about what went wrong with Boeing's 737 Max this jet that crashed twice basically back-to-back over the past year and both times killed everybody on board remind us what you have uncovered about those crashes up until now what went wrong so the first 737 Max crashes in October it's not really clear what's going on it seems like it's a new automated system on the plane less

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five months later another plane crashes in Ethiopia and at that point the US and Regulators around the world ground the plane that's when we really started digging into what went wrong here Natalie kitchen with is a business reporter at the times and one of the central questions we've been trying to get at is how was this plane designed and how is it certified what we found out was that what

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a buted to both accidents was this m caste system that was supposed to help Pilots but what it actually did was constantly push the nose of the plane down so they had to struggle with it in both accidents and the system pushed both planes into fatal nosedives

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and so there were design weaknesses there that were built into this system from the very beginning and on the regulator side we learned that the Federal Aviation Administration basically handed Boeing the responsibility for determining the safety of much of this aircraft Boeing was regulating itself to a certain degree and Boeing never really fully explains this system M cast to the

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Regulators and this is the system that contributes to both of the crashes

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but one of the central questions that remained was what did Boeing know what did the executives at the highest levels of the company know about potential problems with this plane about potential flaws in this system and when do they know it and that's why the CEO of Boeing Dennis Muhlenberg was hauled up to the hill to testify in front of Congress this week for the first time since both crashes because lawmakers had the same

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that we did this hearing will come to order thank you all for being here today right and you were there so set the scene for us of what this was like inside the capitol so the hearings start on Tuesday in the Senate and the room is palpably tense there is a row of family members of the victims of the crashes that are holding signs showing the faces of their loved ones and then Dennis Muhlenberg files in and he takes his seat

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eat and he begins delivering his opening statement German worker ranking member count well committee members thank you for the opportunity to join you today and we share your commitment to Aviation safety he's not someone who's known as a very comfortable public speaker he sometimes has a wooden effect before we start today I'd like to speak directly to the families of the victims who are here with us but he begins his opening statement

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I meant by immediately apologizing to the families we are sorry deeply and truly sorry

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as a husband and father myself I'm I'm heartbroken by your losses

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I think about you and your loved ones every day and I know our entire Boeing team does as well he says that the company knows that it made mistakes and he vows to make improvements we can and must do better this is someone whose entire career basically has been devoted to the Boeing Company I started at Boeing as a summer intern in Seattle

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I was a junior at Iowa State University studying engineering

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having grown up on a family farm in Iowa I was awestruck to work at the company that brought the jet age to the world and helped land a person on the moon he's saying look we share your commitment to safety and that's what he's there to really persuade them of and he says you know that he is looking forward to their questions questions that turn out to be a pummeling from Senators what do you mean well the senators from the get-go are really laying into mr. Muhlenberg I've got it

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and I think I told you guys this is an office sometime ago I would walk before I was to get on the 737 Max I would walk there's no way and the one who really goes the hardest is Senator Ted Cruz mr. mellenburg I have to say the testimony here today has been quite dismayed Senator Cruz starts in on a really intense line of questioning about this set of instant messages from

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November 2016 long before the crashes that Congress just recently got its hands on this was a text exchange between Mark forkner who was then Boeing's Chief technical pilot for the Max and mr. Gustafson Boeing 737 Chief technical pilot is that right

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I believe that's the case Senator so this exchange is stunning in the messages one of the pilots a guy named Mark forkner is talking about how M cast this system is causing him trouble in the simulator mr. forkner oh shocker alert em Cass is now active down to M2 it's running rampant in the Sim on me he says it's running rampant in the flight simulator that's

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this giant machine that's used for testing and then he says Mr forkner so basically I lied to The Regulators unknowingly so I basically lied to regulators unknowingly and what does he mean by that well the times revealed in an investigation earlier this year that forkner months before these messages had asked the FAA to take em cast to take this system out of the pilots manual and at the time he described it as

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a system that would almost never activate in a normal flight and that wasn't all that significant he played down the risks it seems like he's realizing that this system em cast is more problematic than he thought and that he had told the FAA that is one possibility and it's certainly what many senators on Tuesday seem to think was happening okay and how does Muhlenberg respond to this line of questioning

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Channing especially from Senator Cruz is coming so hard to him about it well Muhlenberg says that he became aware of these messages between the pilots before the second crash but he says he did not dig into the details until very recently hmm and that's the point on which Senator Cruz really hammers him he says you're the CEO the buck stops with you

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did you read this document and how did your team not put it in front of you run in with their hair on fire saying we got a real problem here how did you not in February set out a 9 alarm fire to say we need to figure out exactly what happened not after all the hearings not after the pressure but because 346 people have died and we don't want another person to die he's basically saying the CEO you should have been on this you

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of wanted to know what was in those messages before the second crash happened and you know senators were asking this question fact that it took another tragedy to actually ground the airplane so you could actually have a fixed that worked why didn't you act sooner why didn't we react why didn't we ground that aircraft a lot sooner still another trans you wouldn't happen why didn't we ground the plane earlier before the second crash exactly we could have avoided a second tragedy and as senator

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we have asked that question over and over and he said if we could go back and do it over if we could go back we would have made a different decision we would ground the plane after the first crash if we had the information then that we have now we would have acted differently but the lawmakers have a different view I mean many of them are saying you did have some of this information and the question they're asking is why

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you act sooner given what was already on your desk right for the central question about what Boeing new when it knew it at least part of the answer is starting to become a little bit clearer according to these Senators which is that the CEO knew something before the second crash and they're saying that something should have been the basis for Action that could have prevented the second

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crash that's right

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we'll be right back

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what happens next in these hearings how do they keep pursuing this question of what was known inside Boeing

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committee on Transportation infrastructure will come to order well they pursue it by continuing to dig into documents on Wednesday these hearings move to the house and the chairman of the transportation committee Peter DeFazio brings new document I put up another document it's right in front of you there and 1217 2015 I don't know if you've aware of this but this was raised by one of your engineers he brings one document that shows

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in 2015 two years before the max was cleared to fly a Boeing Employee raised concerns about the fact that the system could trigger based on just one sensor are we vulnerable to a single AOA sensor failure with the m cast implementation or is there some checking that occurs and the employee basically said wait a minute doesn't that make this system vulnerable to a single point of failure the concern is if

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One sensor is responsible for all this then if that sensor fails the whole system is in Jeopardy and that is precisely what happened in both of the crashes so that's a very specific warning and a warning that came according to DeFazio years before the plane was even on the market which feels like a very significant and potentially damning Revelation right and then we have information

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headed to the committee my Boeing which will now be the second slide we also saw a document that showed that Boeing Employees determined in June of 2018 this is after the plane is flying but months before the first crash that if Pilots took more than 10 seconds to intervene after an M cast malfunction the results could be catastrophic and it says a slow Reaction Time scenario 10 seconds found the failure

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ER to be catastrophic meaning the plane would go down that a 10-second delay which doesn't seem like a lot of time to me for just 10 seconds there was basically no margin for error and the plane could crash right now keep in mind 10 seconds for a pilot is longer than it seems but what we saw in these accidents is that Pilots weren't immediately responding to this system there were so many warnings in the cockpit as

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the system was going off as it was malfunctioning that they became overwhelmed it seemed and that's part of why what you saw was there fighting against this nose down movement until the planes both went into fatal nosedives I like to read from an email that was sent to the general manager of the 737 program in June 2018 and we also heard about an exchange between a Boeing Employee and the general manager of the 737 program from June 2018

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and again this is months before the first crash in which this employee says that I have some safety concerns that I need to share with you as the leader of the 737 program my first concern he States is that our Workforce is exhausted the workforce is exhausted on the 737 line employees are fatigued employees are fatigued

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from having to work at a very high pace for an extended period of time fatigue employees make mistakes make mistakes and that schedule pressure combined with fatigue is creating a culture where employees are either deliberately or unconsciously circumventing established processes this employee points to process breakdowns and says look all my internal warning bells are going off and for the first time

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my life I am sorry to say that I am hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane wow so in this second day of hearings as these documents are being presented or described does it become clear whether Muhlenberg or any of the senior Executives at Boeing saw them when they were being generated and of course before the planes crashed

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well we don't know in every case but we know for sure that he received the warning about how the 737 line workers were fatigued and potentially cutting Corners because that email went directly to him Congressman I'm familiar with that last communication that you referenced and we did have several follow-up sessions with him I told him I appreciated the fact that he brought up those issues and concerns and just one quick follow-up

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don't have DeFazio ask mr. mellenburg did you slow down production after you received this message did you reduce the rate of production that point in time given his concerns and Mark said no sir we did not change the production rate again I think it's very important that when you change production rate in the line like ours any change up or down I understand there's a whole supply chain he said that the 737 Factory kept churning out the planes at a rate of 50 to a month he said that it would have

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compromise safety to slow down production all of a sudden it wasn't exactly clear what he meant by that hmm Natalie what is it say about Boeing that all these puzzle pieces all these various concerns that have been revealed over the past few days that they never really came together for Boeing and its top Executives at least in the telling of the CEO to the point where the company felt it needed to act

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look I think Boeing is wrestling with that question right now on the one hand you can see how inside the biggest aircraft maker in the world there are sometimes emails that go to the CEO that might go unnoticed there are issues that people have that might not be taken seriously at the time because Engineers always have disputes you know these things are always discussed in retrospect it can look much more significant but at the time

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I'm it's just viewed as part of the process on the other hand this isn't just any other giant Corporation this is the biggest airplane manufacturer in the world the job is to produce safe airplanes and when there are two catastrophic accidents that kill 346 people it's obvious that lawmakers investigators family members of the victims are going to comb through every warning

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every potential concern that either was elevated to the highest levels or should have been and they're going to ask why didn't you do more

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so after these two days of testimony it's very clear that Boeing CEO is sorry but it sounds like his overall messages that Boeing knowing what it knew at the time did what it could do but that the puzzle pieces did not come together in a way that would have really allowed bowing to prevent these two plane crashes and I wonder if that seems credible to these lawmakers I

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to say I think overall they believed that he was genuinely sorry that he genuinely wanted to make improvements but they seem to unconvinced that Boeing did all it could do and really what they were pressing on was the question of accountability they want someone may be more than one person to be held responsible for these accidents let me ask you this mr. Guttenberg you said you're accountable at one

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a point representative Stephen Cohen of Tennessee was basically yelling at Muhlenberg what is accountability mean are you taking a cut in pay or you working for free from now on till you can cure this problem these peoples relatives are not coming back they're gone asking him what does accountability mean your salary still on is anybody at Boeing taking a cut or working for free to try to rectify this problem and what is Muhlenberg say Congressman it's not about the money for me that's not why I came are you giving up any money

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Congressman my board will conduct a comprehensive review that so you're saying you're not giving up any compensation at all he said basically my pay is up to the board he noted that Executives at the company weren't going to be getting a bonus this year again our board will make those determinations are not accountable bin you're staying the board's accountable Congressman I am accountable sir I take responsibility for these two accidents that occurred on my watch I feel responsible to carry that through

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as I mentioned earlier I grew up in a farm in Iowa my dad taught me responsibility he said you know I'm an Iowa farm boy I was taught by my dad that you work through these things what he told me his to when they're faced with challenges to carry through and I don't want to run away from challenges my intent is to see this through when asked if he was going to step down and I want to ask you are you going to be stepping down

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on a CEO of Boeing he said directly Irish woman I know no no but the lawmakers really didn't let this issue of accountability go at one point one of the representative said Mr malmberg turn Face the families look them in the eye I want you to take a look at them just for one second because obviously you haven't spoken to them congresswoman I'm gonna continue thank you mr. Muhlenberg so Natalie how do these two days of hearings end

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thank the gentlelady I ask unanimous consent so at the conclusion of all of this as the final hearing is wrapping up I step outside with Nadia Miller and who's the mother of Samuel Sumo who died in the Ethiopia crash I just want to know after two days of hearings how do you feel and I asked her how of these hearings been for you what do you make of this and she says she's not satisfied in fact I'm horrified

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that he's getting a 50 million dollar award after these Russians she's outraged by how much Muhlenberg makes and she can't believe these new Revelations the idea that there's new evidence that Boeing and that Muhlenberg knew about employee concerns before the crash has it sounds like you feel like there have been New pieces of information that definitely that have come to life definitely new piece of information both slides definitely shocking

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people wave their hand at Boeing and said things are wrong and that he basically ignore them I mean it just has her incensed and then and she says to me you know I actually need to go because I want to go confront him face-to-face when this thing ends well we go back inside DeFazio hits the gavel the hearings over everybody's filing out and Nadia marches over to Muhlenberg and meets him face to face and you know you could tell his people want to get him out of there there's just

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security guard around but he talks to her one of the things she says to him is you know you kept saying that you're an Iowa farm boy you know and then you put talked about we talked about Iowa just like one too many times in the whole group said go back to the farm go back to Iowa do that well we the family members of the victims want you to go back to the farm and it's because when you make

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mistakes like that and you can acknowledge them then you know maybe someone else to do that work she saying we don't think you're the guy that should be in here trying to solve this we don't trust you that's what she's saying she's saying we don't want you in there and he says I respect your inputs there and tell you we are very focused on safety and you have my commitment my personal commitment and the commitment of our company we're going to make the safety improvements we need to

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make and so at the end of this threat this kind of impasse where she's saying we want you out and he says I hear you but I'm not going anywhere that's her parents thank you and transparency

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at that point they turn and walk away from each other she walks over to the group of families and he walks out of the hearing that all sounds kind of unsatisfying to everybody yeah I don't think anybody walked out feeling particularly good about what happened in that room

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Natalie thank you thanks for having me

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the Boeing 737 Max remains grounded the company's board of directors is standing by Dennis Muhlenberg and Congress says its investigation will continue

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we'll be right back

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here's what else you need to know today in the latest testimony before impeachment investigators a Foreign Service Officer assigned to the White House Katherine Croft offered new insight into the campaign to fire the US ambassador to Ukraine Marie jovanovic the officer testified that a well-known former Republican Congressman Robert Livingston now a lobbyist repeatedly told her that jovanovic

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needed to be removed because she was an ally of President Obama with a liberal agenda the same dubious claims made by President Trump and his lawyer Bree Giuliani

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both Trump and Giuliani viewed jovanovic as an obstacle in their attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump's Rivals

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Aunt well right now the fire is encircling the Air Force One Pavilion where obviously the famous Air Force once it's a national treasure the latest California wildfire in Ventura County burned its way to within a hundred yards of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library who's executive director in an interview with CBS news said that the Flames had encircled the Pavilion holding way

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and private plane so far the library has been protected but we're surrounded on all sides by the fire right now like many of the fires that have erupted in recent dates the Ventura County Blaze was fueled by dry conditions and wind gusts that have reached hurricane Force

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in Western Los Angeles a different fire briefly threatened the Getty Center a museum filled with Priceless artworks before firefighters beat back the flames

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that's it for the daily I'm Michael borrow see you tomorrow

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energy is changing quickly how much do you know about it try this quick quiz which country produces the most natural gas Russia or the US the US which recently bumped Russia to take the title as the world's top producer Rising supplies translate into greater reliability but that's just one part of the story to keep growing the world also needs more affordable and ever cleaner energy options to learn more via your Amazon smart speaker say hey Alexa open Chevron energy challenge