The Daily - What Boeing Knew

Episode Date: October 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: Boeing successfully lobbied to reduce government oversight of airplane design.Evidence presented to House investigators on Wednesday revealed that Boeing was aware of potentially “catastrophic” concerns about the 737 Max’s safety before the first crash.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. 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? It's Thursday, October 31st. 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 than five months later, another plane crashes in Ethiopia. And at that point, the U.S. and regulators around the world ground the plane. That's when we really started digging into what went wrong here. Natalie Kitcherwiff 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 was it certified? What we found out was that what contributed to both accidents was this MCAS 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. 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, MCAS, to the regulators. And this is the system that contributes to both of the crashes. 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 did they know it? And that's why the CEO of Boeing, Dennis Mullenberg, 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 questions 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 Mellenberg files in and he takes his seat

and he begins delivering his opening statement. Chairman Wicker, Ranking Member Cantwell, 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 affect. 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 by immediately apologizing to the families of the victims who are here with us. But he begins his opening statement by immediately apologizing to the families. We are sorry, deeply and truly sorry.

As a husband and father myself, I'm heartbroken by your losses. 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. I was a junior at Iowa State University studying engineering, 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. Mullenberg. I've got to tell you, and I think I told you guys this in office some time ago, I would walk before I was to get on a 737 MAX. I would walk. There's no way. And the one who really goes the hardest is Senator Ted Cruz. Mr. Mullenberg, I have to say the testimony here today has been quite dismaying. Testimony here today has been quite dismaying. Senator Cruz starts in on a really intense line of questioning about this set of instant messages from November 2016, long before the crashes, that Congress just recently got its hands on. This was a text exchange between Mark Fortner, who was then Boeing's chief technical pilot for the MAX, and Mr. Gustafson, Boeing's 737 chief technical pilot. Is that right? 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 MCAS, this system, is causing him trouble in the simulator. Mr. Forkner, oh, shocker alert. MCAS 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 this giant machine that's used for testing. And then he says, flight simulator. That's 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 MCAS, to take this system out of the pilot's manual. And at the time, he described it as 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, MCAS, 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 seemed to think was happening. Okay, and how does Mullenberg respond to this line of questioning, especially from Senator Cruz, who's coming so hard at him about it. Well, Mullenberg 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. And that's the point on which Senator Cruz really hammers him. He says, you're the CEO.

The buck stops with you. 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 nine 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 to the CEO, you should have been on this. You should have wanted to

know what was in those messages before the second crash happened. And, you know, senators were asking him this question. The fact that it took another tragedy to actually ground the airplane so you could actually have a fix that worked. Why didn't you act sooner? Why didn't we react? Why didn't we ground that aircraft a lot sooner so another tragedy wouldn't happen? Why didn't we ground the plane earlier? Before the second crash. Exactly. We could have avoided a second tragedy. Senator, we have asked that question over and over. 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 didn't you act sooner, given what was already on your desk? Right. So the central question about what Boeing knew 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 crash. That's right. We'll be right back. What happens next in these hearings?

How do they keep pursuing this question of what was known inside Boeing. 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 documents. I put up another document. It's right in front of you there. And 12-17-2015. I don't know if you're aware of this, but this was raised by one of your engineers.

He brings one document that shows that 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 MCAS 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? to a single point of failure. The concern is, if 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 provided to the committee by 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 MCAS malfunction, the result could be catastrophic. And it says a slow reaction time scenario, 10 seconds, found the failure to be catastrophic. Meaning the plane would go down. A 10-second delay, which doesn't seem like a lot of time to me. 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 this system was going off, as it was malfunctioning, that they became overwhelmed, it seemed. And that's part of why what you saw was they're fighting against this nose-down movement until the planes both went into fatal nosedives. I'd 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. 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 from having to work at a very high pace for an extended period of time. Fatigued 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 in 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 Mullenberg or any of the senior executives at Boeing saw them when they were being generated and, of course, before the planes crashed. 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. Representative DeFazio asked Mr. Mullenberg, did you slow down production after you received this message? Did you reduce the rate of production at that point in time, given his concerns? And Mullenberg said no. Sir, we did not change the production rate. Again, I think it's very important that when you change production rate in a line like ours, any change up or down.

Sir, I understand there's a whole supply chain. That's good. He said that the 737 factory kept churning out the planes at a rate of 52 a month. He said that it would have compromised safety to slow down production all of a sudden. It wasn't exactly clear what he meant by that. Natalie, what does 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.

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. You know, in retrospect, it can look much more significant. But at the time, 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, 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? So after these two days of testimony, it's very clear that Boeing's CEO is sorry. But it sounds like his overall message is 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 Boeing to prevent these two plane crashes. And I wonder if that seems credible to these lawmakers. I have to say, I think overall, they believed that he was genuinely sorry, that he genuinely wanted to make improvements. But they seemed unconvinced that Boeing did all it could do. And really what they were pressing on was the question of accountability. They want

someone, maybe more than one person, to be held responsible for these accidents. Let me ask you this, Mr. Muhlenberg. You said you're accountable. At one point, Representative Stephen Cohen of Tennessee was basically yelling at Muhlenberg. What does accountability mean? Are you taking a cut in pay? Are you working for free from now on until you can cure this problem? These people's relatives are not coming back. They're gone. Asking him, what does accountability mean? Your salary's still on. Is anybody at Boeing taking a cut or working for free to try to rectify this problem? And what does Mullenberg say? Congressman, it's not about the money for me. That's not why I came. Are you giving up any

money? Congressman, my board will conduct a comprehensive review. 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. You're not accountable then. You're saying 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. As I mentioned earlier, I grew up on 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 is that 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 as CEO of Boeing? He said directly. Congresswoman, to be stepping down as CEO of Boeing? He said directly.

Congresswoman, I, no. No. No. But the lawmakers really didn't let this issue of accountability go. At one point, one of the representatives said, Mr. Mullenberg, 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... I'm going to continue. Thank you, Mr. Molenberg. So, Natalie, how do these two days of hearings end? I 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 Milleran, who's the mother of Samia Stumo, who died in the Ethiopia crash. I just want to know, after two days of hearings, how do you feel now? And I asked her, how have these hearings been for you? What do you make of this? And she says she's not satisfied. In fact, I am horrified that he's getting a $15 million reward after these crashes. She's outraged by how much Mullenberg makes, and she can't believe these new revelations.

The idea that there's new evidence that Boeing and that Mullenberg knew about employee concerns before the crashes. It sounds like you feel like there have been new pieces of information that have come to light. Definitely new pieces of information. Those slides are definitely shocking to me that people waved their hand at Boeing and said things are wrong. And then he basically ignored them. I mean, it just has her incensed. 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.

So we go back inside. DeFazio hits the gavel. The hearing's over. Everybody's filing out. And Nadia marches over to Mullenberg and meets him face to face. And, you know, you could tell his people want to get him out of there. There's a security guard around. But he talks to her.

One of the things she says to him is, We're talking about your performance and, like and how you've done in this company. You know, you kept saying that you're an Iowa farm boy. You know, and then you start talking about Iowa. And you talked about Iowa just like one too many times. And 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. 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 all mistakes like that, and you can acknowledge them, then, you know, maybe someone else should do that work. She's 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'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. I just 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 make. And so at the end of this, they're at this kind of impasse where she's saying, we want you out.

And he says, I hear you, but I'm not going anywhere. Transparency. Thank you. Transparency. 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. Natalie, thank you. Thanks for having me.

The Boeing 737 MAX remains grounded. The company's board of directors is standing by Dennis Mullenberg, and Congress says its investigation will continue. We'll be right back. 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, Catherine Croft,

offered new insight into the campaign to fire the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. The officer testified that a well-known former Republican congressman, Robert Livingston, now a lobbyist, repeatedly told her that Yovanovitch 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, Rudy Giuliani. Same dubious claims made by President Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Both Trump and Giuliani viewed Yovanovitch as an obstacle in their attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump's rivals. And... Well, right now the fire is encircling the Air Force One pavilion where obviously the famous Air Force One sits. It's a national treasure. The latest California wildfire in Ventura County burned its way to within 100 yards of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, whose executive director, in an interview with CBS News, said that the flames had encircled the pavilion holding Reagan's private plane. So far the library's been protected, but we're surrounded on all sides by the fire right now.

Like many of the fires that have erupted in recent days, the Ventura County blaze was fueled by dry conditions and wind gusts that have reached hurricane force. conditions and wind gusts that have reached hurricane force. In western Los Angeles, a different fire briefly threatened the Getty Center, a museum filled with priceless artworks before firefighters beat back the flames. That's it for the day. I'm Michael Babar. See you tomorrow.