Boeing Engineers Called Their Own Plane 'Designed by Clowns.' They Were Right.
A software system meant to quietly correct the plane's nose was, in two crashes, the thing that put it into the ground.
The 737 MAX's new engines changed how the plane handled, so Boeing added software called MCAS to automatically correct the nose pitch, quietly, without pilots needing to know it existed or be retrained for it — retraining being expensive for airlines and a competitive disadvantage for Boeing. Internally, employees were less confident than the marketing. "This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys," one wrote to a colleague in 2017.
Boeing's own chief technical pilot flagged "egregious" problems with MCAS in flight simulations as early as 2016, and later admitted in messages that he may have unintentionally misled the FAA about it. Another exchange, eight months before the first fatal crash, asked plainly: "Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft?" The answer was "No."
In October 2018, a Lion Air 737 MAX crashed off Indonesia. In March 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crashed five months later. Both were traced to MCAS forcing the nose down based on a single faulty sensor reading, with pilots never told the system existed. 346 people died across the two crashes before the plane was grounded worldwide.
Boeing didn't hand the internal messages to the FAA until October 2019, months after the second crash and the global grounding. Reading them after the fact is less like uncovering a scandal and more like finding a signed confession that had been sitting in a drawer the whole time.
Filed from public reporting:
