The Boeing 737 Max was grounded early last year after one of the planes crashed in October 2018 and another in March 2019.
Now, a chilling series of internal Boeing emails has revealed that Boeing employees were pretty … let’s just say “flippant” about safety concerns surrounding the jetliner.
The emails were part of more than 100 pages of documents sent Thursday by Boeing to House and Senate committees that have been investigating the aircraft maker in the wake of two crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed a combined 346 people. The 737 Max family has been grounded for nearly a year, with no return date yet.
The emails were also made public, in three batches: here, here and here.
“This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” read one email.
Ouch.
Another email said, “I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year.” Yet another employee asked a colleague, “Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.” The other employee responded, “No.”
In a statement, Rep Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon), chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, said, “These newly-released emails are incredibly damning. 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. I can only imagine how painful it must be for the families of the 346 victims to read these new documents that detail some of the earliest and most fundamental errors in the decisions that went into the fatally flawed aircraft.”
Remember this the next time Donald Trump brags about cutting industry regulations. Turns out government oversight is actually kinda-sorta important, and self-regulating industries — surprise! — are not always so keen to flag problems.
Seems too many people were more interested in Boeing stock staying up than Boeing planes staying aloft.
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