Today, Explained - Grounded

Episode Date: March 28, 2019

Unsettling details continue to arise about Boeing's 737 Max and now Congress is pressing the FAA and America's largest manufacturing exporter for answers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Show's coming up in just a second. Before that, KiwiCo is offering y'all the chance to try out their educational projects for the children for free. To redeem the offer and learn more about KiwiCo's projects for kids of all ages, visit KiwiCo.com slash explain. That's K-I-W-I-C-O dot com slash explained. Andrew McIntosh, you report on aviation for the Puget Sound Business Journal in Seattle, Washington. We talked to you a few weeks ago. It was just after President Trump grounded all of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in the United States. A lot has happened since then with Boeing and the MAX 8 and the FAA. Can you walk us through it all? Where do we start? Well, we start with the chaos for the airlines.

With all those airplanes glued to the ground, they had to scramble and they had to secure alternative airplanes because they are preparing for what is their biggest time of the year. Christmas? And that is the summer holidays. Oh, got it. You've seen just Southwest Airlines has taken 34 MAXs from all over the country and parked them in the desert in Victorville, California, while this whole mess gets sorted out.

How much is it costing the airlines and the aviation industry? Well, Southwest alone put a cost of about $50 million on its first quarter revenues. Obviously, these costs are going to continue. They've canceled thousands of flights, both United and Southwest and other carriers who had scheduled flights with the MAX. So that's been one of the biggest impacts of this storm that has happened. What more have we learned about what happened with each of these planes, starting with Lion Air? We've learned from the first one, the Lion Air crash in Indonesia, a tantalizingly tragic new fact has emerged in reports from there, which revealed that the day before the Lion Air crash, there was another flight. And that flight experienced the same sequence of

gut-churdling events with the plane going into a steep dive and a plunge. And sort of a captain who was flying a ferry flight sitting in the jump seat was the one who actually pulled the plane out of what would have been a very fatal situation by deactivating something in the cockpit. And they got into the airport and he reported this to his staff on the ground and to maintenance. And so the big question becomes for that particular crash, why was that plane flying the next day anyways? And do we have an answer to that question yet? We don't have an answer to that question. And what about the Ethiopian Airlines flight? One thing a lot of people were surprised to learn was that that plane didn't have all the available safety

features? This little factoid emerged that there were extra safety options on the MAX that you could purchase. And many airlines declined to get them. You know, in the context of, you know, a bunch of people dying, it doesn't look good on the airline or on Boeing to charge extra for what is a safety feature. Should all of these safety features been mandatory that could have alerted pilots and mechanics to issues with the sensors? Should they have been mandatory? Yes or no? Senator, safety-critical pieces of equipment on an aircraft are mandatory. That's what certification does. Should the FAA ban the practice of airlines selling safety features a la carte to the airlines? Yes or no? Senator Markey, I will tell you that if there is any manufacturer that sells a safety-critical part a la carte, we will not permit it. Yesterday, there were multiple

congressional hearings about this mess here in D.C. What else were they asking the FAA? They were questioned about the process under which the MAX 8 airplane was certified as airworthy and safe. The FAA decided to do safety on the cheap and put the Fox in charge of the hen house. That was true of the 737 MAX 8. And that happens under a very complicated process where the FAA delegates some of those tasks to the actual airplane manufacturers. So the manufacturer has a role in approving the safety of its own aircraft before they put it out for sale to the world. So there were some very heated questions. How do we ensure that FAA can take over safety evaluation if issues are discovered during the testing and evaluation phase? It is an active, constantly changing dynamic in a certification,

and that's what happened during the certification of the MAX. There was suggestions that this relationship between the FAA and Boeing has become far too cozy. Not only have the recent crashes shaken the confidence of the public, but the questions that have been raised in the aftermath about FAA's oversight of aircraft manufacturers, the certification process for planes, and the close relationship between industry and regulator threatened to erode trust in the entire system. Some people even started talking about the FAA should be the ones doing all the approvals themselves. And Daniel Elwell, the interim head of the FAA, had a very good response to them on that issue. It would require roughly 10,000 more employees to do that role at the FAA and about $1.8 billion

for our certification office in the FAA. Oh, it's a job creator. Great. Andrew, I mean, all told, we've been surprised so many times, those of us who don't know much about how the aviation industry works in the past few weeks with relation to these two crashes. We've heard that pilots were already having trouble with a plane that eventually went down and killed more than 100 people. We found out that another plane that went down and killed more than 100 people didn't have all of the safety features it could have because that cost extra. We've learned that the FAA was trusting Boeing to certify its own plane. For the general public, these are all very surprising and troubling revelations. But I wonder for you, someone who reports on the aviation industry, what has caught you most off guard in the past couple weeks with regard to these two crashes?

What surprised me the most was how Boeing handled the communications surrounding these series of events. We're working with customers and regulators around the world to restore faith in our industry and also to reaffirm our commitment to safety and to earning the trust of the flying public. The executives who were doing pre-recorded videos, they were unemotional. They seemed to lack empathy. That shifted over into the second week. Boeing started to sound a little more empathetic to the situation. But I don't think that people were very receptive to the kinds of things they were doing and saying. And, you know, they were, despite people being dead, they weren't,

they were saying that there was no problem with the airplane, that it's a safe airplane, that everything was fine. And to the rest of us who are watching these events unfold, it was clearly not fine. All of the focus is on Boeing right now, but to really understand how all of this happened, you got to take a look at Boeing's biggest rival. I'm Sean Ramos for him. That's next on Today Explained. Hello? Hello, is this Harvey? Yes, it is. Harvey, Sean from Today Explained. Been looking for a kid to talk to about KiwiCo all week.

You are that kid. How you doing? Bored from waiting for you to call. Ouch. Okay, well, we'll get right to it. Your dad is a friend of the show. He told me that you have an interest in KiwiCo, and KiwiCo is offering today, Explained listeners, the chance to try out their educational projects for free right now at KiwiCo.com slash Explained. Have you ever now at KiwiCo.com. Have you ever tried out KiwiCo, Harvey?

No. All right, well, with a KiwiCo subscription each month, people like you, Harvey, young people, you receive a fun, engaging new project that will help with your creativity and confidence. How does that sound to you, Harvey? Cool. And if you could get any project in the mail, what would you want it to be about? Maybe the

folks at KiwiCo are listening. Um, cats. Cats? We want a KiwiCo project about cats. Sure. Alright, man. Take care. Thanks so much for your time. Yeah. Andrew, I think the other side of this story that's been sort of revelatory for the past two weeks is what we found out about how the Boeing 737 MAX 8 was rolled out. Can you tell us the story of how this plane came to be? Yeah, it's a very interesting story because it involves Boeing giving birth to this new airplane in the landscape of competition.

Boeing is a competitor with the French-German airplane maker Airbus. And Airbus, back a few years ago, came out with a sexy new airplane that offered airlines, you know, the holy grail. They had new engines on it, and it offered them between 15 and 20 percent savings on fuel. For airlines, fuel is one of their biggest costs. And if you can shave their fuel bill 15 to 20%, you are going to get some orders. And that's exactly what happened with Airbus A320neo. Neo standing for the new engine option. And so Boeing sat there with its older version of the 737 and watched Airbus just pile up hundreds and hundreds and thousands of orders for this new single aisle airplane.

And they realized they had to do something. Their business was being impacted. The single aisle 737 for years for Boeing, and we're talking decades, has been their cash cow, their money maker, the thing that they derive all their profits from to invest into other projects and new airplanes. So they really had to act. And instead of designing their own new airplane to compete with the A320neo, they decided to do this upgraded, souped-up version of the 737 model of the day, which was called the Next Generation,

and build a QuickMax. So they used the same engines that the Airbus A320 uses, but the way the engines sat on the plane kind of made the plane tilt a little forward. And that's why they needed this special software flight control system to keep the plane on track as it was flying. I guess for the, you know, lay person hearing that Boeing wanted to compete with Airbus as quickly as possible. So it designed this update for its 737, which involved putting a heavier engine into the plane. And this caused the plane to dip nose first. So then they designed some software to fix that. It might sound like Boeing's cutting corners. Is that the case?

I think if you would ask Boeing, their answer to that question would be, no, we're not cutting any corners. We're just designing systems so that the airplane performs smoothly and flies easily. They would argue that the systems were thoroughly vetted. If you're an accident investigator right now and you're looking at what happened, there are what we call the human factors in every airplane crash. What did the pilots know about this system? Were they trained to operate it? Did they know what to do if the system kicked in and was constantly pushing the plane's nose down, as it appeared to be doing on both flights? Those questions are going to be really important for the investigators. And, you know, it's clear that Boeing has waited around for the accident investigation reports to

come out because of things that they did and rolled out this week. Boeing is also going to be enhancing 737 MAX pilot training. They outlined that for us today. Here's the vice president of Boeing talking about the importance... Is it fair to say that this idea that pilots needed extra training to fly this plane because of this sort of quirk that the plane had, that that wasn't stressed enough by Boeing, by the FAA? Well, certainly pilots now believe that it wasn't. But what I think has become clear is that the people who developed that system didn't expect it to operate with the power and speed and absolute determination that it seems to have done. When I talked about Boeing rolling out some things this week,

they've upgraded the software. They've made it safer by having special additional systems that can allow the pilot to just disengage and turn this thing off and cut the power to it. And there's been a second element here involving a sensor that may have been sending false readings to that computer system, triggering it to act when in fact there was no reason for it to act. Boeing built the airplane with this system relying on a single sensor. And there will now be going forward in every MAX a second sensor. Andrew, I think the farther we get from one of these tragedies, the more we end up talking about, you know, the investigation, the policy, the Senate hearings, the companies, the FAA, the regulation. I wonder, you know, how is Boeing responding to the people?

I mean, hundreds and hundreds of families, thousands and thousands of people have been affected and have lost loved ones. How is Boeing dealing with that? With every single statement they do make about these accidents, the first thing they say is they are feeling the grief and the pain and the sorrow of all those families. Are they also feeling the pain of lawsuits from these families? Well, they are. Some of the families from Lion Air have already filed lawsuits in Seattle. There will be others.

And there will be other lawsuits from airlines who are going to be demanding compensation from Boeing for the loss of use of their aircraft, which are parked on the ground. And then there's a third set of lawsuits that Boeing is going to have to wrestle with and defend. And those will be potential class action lawsuits from investors who will allege that these airplanes were sold with flaws and that they've lost a lot of money on their investments due to no fault of their own. And so Boeing is going to have all that legal swirl and churl to deal with, in addition to all the engineering and scientific

challenges that they're going to have with the airplane. And to get these system upgrades on the MAX approved, because nobody has yet approved them, we still have no idea how long this crisis is going to go. When Boeing had problems with their lithium batteries in the Dreamliner airplanes back in 2013, they were grounded for three months. And in that one, nobody had even died. Is this a wake-up call for Boeing? Did it grow too powerful and beyond reproach and now it'll have to dial back and play by a tighter set of rules? Well, for years, Boeing has been literally the king of the hill in Washington, D.C. It has a very big lobbying team and government operations people. And with these series of

events, the lawmakers who sit on the several committees that are investigating and doing oversight right now have made it very clear that they are going to call senior Boeing executives to testify before them and that this is not going to be an easy ride. They've built a very close relationship with the Trump administration over the last few years. Mr. Trump has been in Vietnam signing off on airplane deals. He has visited Boeing's Charleston, South Carolina plant. They have sold the president new Air Force One jets. And so that proximity is now going to face some additional scrutiny that Boeing is certainly not used to as the country's literally largest manufacturing exporter. Thank you.