Boeing's Troubled 737 Max Plane | “Boeing’s Fatal Flaw" Update (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

>> The plane suddenly lost a section

of its fuselage mid-flight...

>> The FAA panel is blasting the aircraft company...

>> NARRATOR: Amid new problems with Boeing's 737 MAX,

>> Where was the oversight to make sure

the most critical pieces were there?

>> A special update to the award-winning investigation with

the "New York Times," into the problem-plagued airplane.

>> Lion Air flight JT610 went missing from radar...

>> And then the second plane crashed.

>> Crashed minutes after taking off...

>> This was going to be an existential crisis

for the company.

>> They had no idea how powerful MCAS was.

>> FAA's oversight was sorely lacking.

>> The mounting pressure on Boeing.

>> This was supposed to be one of the most highly

scrutinized planes in the world.

Here you are with another incident that

was risking passengers' lives.

>> We are going to approach this, number one,

acknowledging our mistake.

>> NARRATOR: Now on FRONTLINE,

>> It had direct echoes of everything

we had been reporting on years ago.

>> NARRATOR: Boeing's Fatal Flaw.

♪ ♪

>> On the morning of October 29,

I was woken up by a colleague

who alerted me that a Lion aircraft crashed.

He said, "It's the MAX,"

and I was surprised, because it was a new aircraft.

My company provided the air data

for aircraft flying around the Jakarta area.

So I went to the computer and looked at the data.

It was immediately apparent that, okay, something was wrong.

(indistinct radio chatter)

The plane went up to about 2,000 feet,

just over a minute after takeoff,

and the plane had a bit of a dive.

And then the plane climbed to about 5,000 feet.

(indistinct radio chatter)

But then, at 5,000 feet,

the plane was fluctuating up and down.

And then the plane just started diving.

It, it just didn't make sense.

You don't see planes diving on departure.

I was baffled. Why did it go down?

♪ ♪

>> Lion Air Flight JT610 went missing from radar...

>> NARRATOR: 189 people were killed in the crash

of Lion Air Flight 610.

>> The Boeing 737 MAX 8...

>> NARRATOR: The plane was a new Boeing 737 MAX.

>> What do we know about this 737 MAX 8?

>> NARRATOR: The fastest-selling jet in Boeing history,

just introduced the year before.

>> We don't yet know what caused this crash.

>> A breakthrough this evening,

the flight data recorder.

It holds many of the keys...

>> NARRATOR: The data from the black box

quickly got to F.A.A. engineers in the United States.

♪ ♪

>> There is a purity of this data.

It comes directly from the black boxes.

So it's recording airspeed, altitude.

>> NARRATOR: The data showed what appeared to be a glitch,

something repeatedly moving part of the plane's tail,

controlling its pitch.

>> It didn't take long, just a couple of minutes, to see

that there was rapid movement

of the horizontal stabilizer.

It's probably the fastest way to kill yourself

in an airplane, is to have the stabilizer malfunction.

♪ ♪

>> My spine literally tingled

when I saw the traces from the black box.

The plane continually tried to push the nose down,

and the pilots were trying over and over again

to stop the plane.

And in the end, they lose that battle.

♪ ♪

>> NARRATOR: What Boeing had not told airlines

or their pilots was that it had put

a powerful software system on the new airplane.

>> In the Lion Air crash,

this system was receiving incorrect information,

and that made the plane dive straight downward

and destroy itself.

♪ ♪

>> NARRATOR: Inside Boeing,

they quickly diagnosed the problem

and began working on a fix.

But they stood by the MAX as hundreds of them

took to the air around the world,

carrying thousands of passengers.

The company alerted pilots

about handling a potential malfunction.

>> Boeing and the F.A.A. today warned airlines

that sensors on 737 MAX 8 jets can malfunction.

>> Boeing are calling this a formal advisory,

and it's been issued to the pilots.

>> The reporting showed Boeing knew

that it was risky,

but their response

was to blame the pilots.

>> Pilots did not hit two cut-off switches.

Boeing says that action was part of

well-established protocols for all 737s.

>> And that led to a series of decisions

that kept the plane in the air.

And then we got another crash.

>> Breaking news out of Ethiopia,

where a plane went down...

>> NARRATOR: It was Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302,

on its way to Nairobi from Addis Ababa.

>> ...where a new 737 MAX 8 jetliner

crashed minutes after taking off.

>> NARRATOR: Two crashes, the same plane;

346 people killed;

an iconic American company's reputation in tatters.

The story of the Boeing 737 MAX would end up

exposing corporate deception

and a broken regulatory process.

But at the center was a software system

supposed to keep people safe

that instead led to their deaths.

>> The black boxes from the Ethiopian crash

have been recovered.

>> It's the second disaster

within five months involving the Boeing 737 MAX.

>> That's the same kind of aircraft that crashed

back in October in Indonesia.

♪ ♪

>> 157 people, including passengers

and crew members on board, all are dead.

>> The first thing you get to see at the site

is a very big hole.

And then to only imagine

this is the place

that they were last alive.

♪ ♪

>> We learned that there were no survivors on the plane.

And then our objective was to go and

bring my daughter's body home.

>> Now you're in close proximity.

You're able to see the fine details.

You're able to maybe think

these are personal effects

belonged to Carol, my sister, or my mom.

Or...

This bone, whose bone is this?

♪ ♪

>> And they told us that there was

no part of a human

that was bigger than a femur that was left.

>> That whole experience is just a jumble of

images and painful thoughts

and blankness, really, to me. I don't really...

I can't really make sense of it.

>> NARRATOR: The crash of Ethiopian Flight 302

was the second time in five months

that a Boeing 737 MAX had gone down.

♪ ♪

As families gathered at the crash site,

across the world, reporters at "The New York Times"

were investigating what had been going wrong

with Boeing's new commercial jet.

>> Statistically speaking, the likelihood that

these two accidents were not in some way connected

was extremely low.

It suggested that there was something going on

with the plane, and obviously

we were determined to find out.

♪ ♪

>> It was clear from the get-go

that Boeing was in full crisis mode.

>> As the facts from

the accident become available

and we understand

the necessary next steps,

we're taking action to fully

reassure airlines and their passengers

of the safety of the 737 MAX.

>> This was going to be an existential crisis

for the company if these two events were related.

>> China grounds the plane first.

Other international regulators ground the plane.

Then the European Union grounds the plane.

>> But in the U.S., the F.A.A. says

it's not grounding the plane.

>> Boeing and the F.A.A. all were saying

that they were sort of waiting

for the facts before they rushed to judgment

and grounded such an important new plane.

>> NARRATOR: But for months,

the "Times" was reporting there was something wrong

with the 737 MAX itself:

the software system that pilots had not known existed.

>> The Maneuvering Characteristics

Augmentation System, or MCAS.

♪ ♪

The function of this previously undisclosed system

was to save the plane

when it believed that the plane might go into a stall

and fall out of the sky.

And so this system was designed then to

sort of take over the stabilizer

and push that nose back down,

in case the pilot gets in trouble.

>> NARRATOR: Then, a major setback for the company:

Radar showed the two planes' flight patterns

were eerily similar.

>> Days after the rest of the world

had reached the same conclusion,

they finally grounded the plane.

>> NARRATOR: For the "New York Times" reporters,

all the signs pointed to MCAS.

>> We knew that MCAS was the beginning,

and we knew that we needed to start with this system.

>> This was a really

problematic software system

in the way it was designed.

Okay, well, then,

how the hell did it end up in the plane this way?

♪ ♪

>> NARRATOR: Boeing declined to be interviewed for this film.

In a statement, the company said

safety is its top priority

and it has worked closely with regulators,

investigators, and stakeholders

"to implement changes that ensure

accidents like these never happen again."

>> This story really begins in 2011.

(jet engine roaring)

>> The 2011 Paris Air Show

officially opened Monday.

>> Boeing and Airbus had been going head-to-head

for at least a decade.

But Air... Airbus had been

quickly catching up and really

nipping at Boeing's heels.

>> It's the best air show ever for Airbus

in terms of aircraft numbers sold.

>> In 2010, Airbus introduced the A320neo,

a more fuel-efficient version

of its stalwart A320.

>> The A320 is the direct competitor to the Boeing 737.

Airlines wanted an airplane

that was more fuel-efficient

than the airplanes then in service.

Airbus chose to re-engine the A320

into what they call the "neo," the "new engine option."

>> It's a record 200 orders for its A320neo.

>> It was one of the fastest-selling programs

of aviation history.

>> And it placed enormous pressure on Boeing to respond.

♪ ♪

Boeing, frankly, was caught flat-footed.

Within a couple of weeks,

Airbus and American Airlines

have the preliminary workings

of what would become the first deal for American

to buy Airbus planes in more than a decade.

Gerard Arpey, the C.E.O. of American Airlines,

calls Jim McNerney, the C.E.O. of Boeing.

It's a courtesy call

at this point,

just letting their longtime supplier

of airplanes know they're going to go

with the competition.

>> And that is essentially

a dagger in the heart of Boeing.

>> And within 48 hours,

Boeing had decided to pull the trigger

on launching the re-engined 737,

which later became branded as the MAX.

>> From the very beginning,

from its birth,

it was marked by

competitive pressure.

♪ ♪

>> NARRATOR: Within days of the second 737 MAX crash,

another investigation

was underway in Washington, D.C.

>> We started getting information

in from whistleblowers, from people,

both current and former F.A.A. and Boeing employees.

>> NARRATOR: Doug Pasternak was leading

a congressional investigation.

This is his first interview

about what he found.

>> As soon as the second accident occurred,

we started our investigation,

and our focus was on the design, development,

and certification of the MAX.

We got hundreds of thousands of pages of documents

from Boeing.

One of the things that really struck me

from speaking to a lot of Boeing employees

was that they were so excited

to go to work at Boeing.

♪ ♪

Boeing is a tremendous engineering company

and a technical marvel, but,

almost without failure,

they point to

a degradation of that mindset

and that safety suffered as a result.

Looking backwards,

I think you can clearly see

the trajectory to tragedy

along the way at, at Boeing.

♪ ♪

>> NARRATOR: Boeing publicly said the MAX

went through a deliberate six-year development process.

But in their first stories,

the "New York Times" reporters found insiders who said

that Boeing executives had been putting the pressure on

to design the new 737 quickly and cheaply.

>> One specific engineer we spoke to was Rick Ludtke.

He helped design the cockpit in the MAX,

and he talked a lot about how there was an obsession

in limiting changes.

>> This program was a much more intense pressure cooker

than I've ever been in.

The company was trying to avoid costs...

minimum change to simplify the training differences,

and to get it done quickly.

It put what had happened

in the context of this

broader corporate narrative.

>> Yeah.

>> Speed was what they seemed to desire.

There was a lot of decision-making

that was somewhat arbitrary and didn't involve as much of the,

of what engineering considers healthy debate.

The challenge to the Boeing designers was that

any designs we create would not drive any new training

that required a simulator.

>> NARRATOR: In his recorded interview with the "Times,"

Ludtke said Boeing management was so determined

to avoid the expense of new training,

they made a bold promise.

>> Sales had made a commitment

with Southwest that for any airplane they delivered

that had a new Level D differences training,

Boeing would pay the company $1 million

per every airplane delivered.

>> If the MAX required simulator training,

it would rebate Southwest a million dollars per plane.

And there's that incentive.

That's why it was so important to Boeing

that pilot training be kept to a minimum.

All of this comes out of

trying to give airlines

the most fuel-efficient

version of a plane

that they can spend as little money training their pilots on.

♪ ♪

>> That meant Boeing had to do a number of things

to make this plane fly like the old one,

and that was because the MAX had much bigger engines on it

to make them more fuel efficient.

>> But because the 737 was

a 50-year-old airplane at this time, practically,

when it came time for Boeing

to put those engines on the wings,

the engines were so darn big,

they had to mount them further forward on the wings.

>> They were testing in this wind tunnel,

and they were discovering the plane was handling

just a little bit differently-- but they didn't even have

a plane built yet, so this wasn't, you know,

happening in real flight-- this is something you have to fix.

And they leaned on

a system that they had used once before in a military tanker.

It was designed as a system on the plane

to really just smooth out the way the plane handled.

>> NARRATOR: It was MCAS.

>> It was designed for these extremely unusual maneuvers.

Situations that, hopefully, the plane would never get in.

And to prevent the nose from getting too high,

the system would move the stabilizer

on the back of the plane to push the nose back down.

>> NARRATOR: But inside Boeing,

there were early signs of trouble.

>> One of the first documents we found

was from November of 2012.

A Boeing test pilot was flying the MAX

in a flight simulator

and trying to respond

to an activation of MCAS.

And that resulted

in what he described as a catastrophic event.

♪ ♪

It showed that if that had been in real life,

he could have lost the airplane.

They realize from that moment on,

even a Boeing test pilot may have trouble responding to MCAS.

>> NARRATOR: The company kept quiet

about the simulator experience

and appeared to have discounted the test results.

Still, in the following months,

some Boeing employees suggested simply removing

all references to MCAS from training manuals.

>> Boeing from almost the very beginning realized

the significance of MCAS,

and the significance MCAS would have

on pilot simulator training.

"If we emphasize MCAS is a new function,

"there may be a greater certification

"and training impact.

"Recommended action:

investigate deletion of MCAS nomenclature."

What that meant was that

if they said MCAS was a new function,

the F.A.A. was going to scrutinize it a lot more.

♪ ♪

>> NARRATOR: Boeing told Congress

it kept the F.A.A. informed about MCAS's development

and final configuration.

But Boeing has a complex and close relationship

with the agency that oversees it.

>> The airplanes are part of the story,

but so are the regulators.

The F.A.A. regulated Boeing,

in part, with a handful

of Boeing employees whose paychecks came from Boeing,

but whose jobs were

to represent the interests of the F.A.A.

>> NARRATOR: It's a decades-old arrangement

known as "delegation"

that allows federal agencies to give oversight powers

to the companies they regulate.

>> In the beginning, there was a really good reason for this.

The F.A.A. was certifying things

that made no sense to have them certify--

every single exit sign or bathroom sign or paint.

The issue that many of the F.A.A. employees

that we talked to had was that

it went way beyond bathroom signs.

Over time,

Congress passed laws that pushed

the F.A.A. to hand over the responsibility for more

and more tasks to the company, to Boeing.

>> With this level of delegation

between the company and the F.A.A.,

it became hard to understand who was working for who.

>> NARRATOR: In the design of the 737 MAX,

many things would be delegated to Boeing.

That included MCAS.

>> Under the impression that this was

a relatively benign system, the F.A.A. agreed to delegate it,

as is the custom

with the F.A.A. and Boeing.

And that's what happened in this case.

It handed it over.

♪ ♪

>> NARRATOR: In a statement, the F.A.A. blamed

ineffective coordination and said it had not focused

on MCAS when it certified the MAX,

because Boeing had not identified MCAS as significant.

Under the orders from Congress, the F.A.A. has

since made changes to the delegation process.

♪ ♪

After years of going through design and development,

the 737 MAX prototype was rolled out

of Boeing's Renton factory for its maiden flight.

>> Look at all the excited faces, wouldn't miss it.

>> Ed Wilson is in the cockpit.

He's the new chief pilot, and he takes off.

>> And let's just take a listen

as this airplane gets ready for its very first takeoff.

(engine roars)

♪ ♪

>> A short time after this first maiden flight,

Ed Wilson, he and his co-pilots start to realize

that the 737 MAX is not handling

as smoothly as it should in certain low-speed situations.

It's shortly after takeoff, you know,

it's still kind of climbing to ascent.

It's not going full speed.

>> NARRATOR: Boeing engineers had an idea

for how to deal with this.

>> They know about MCAS

and they know that MCAS was actually used

for a similar situation in these high-speed maneuvers,

and so theoretically,

MCAS could also be used in these other situations

to also smooth out the handling.

Crucially, it's already been created,

it's already been approved,

and it's something that we could just apply,

you know, to a different phase of flight.

It's actually a pretty easy fix.

This ends up being an extremely fateful decision.

They enable the stabilizer

to move much more-- actually, four times as much.

Now the system's designed for low-speed situations,

like just after takeoff.

And after takeoff is when the plane is still

only a few thousand feet over the ground.

That means you have much less room for error.

It's happening in an automated fashion

and a repeated fashion.

This fundamentally changes MCAS.

It makes it much more aggressive, much more risky.

It's a far more dangerous system.

♪ ♪

>> NARRATOR: Boeing was doubling down on the system,

expanding it,

despite the earlier catastrophic result in a simulator test.

>> NARRATOR: The "Times'" reporting on MCAS focused

on a former Boeing pilot.

>> I started to hear about a pilot at Boeing

whose name was Mark Forkner,

the chief technical pilot for the 737.

>> He was this key liaison

between the company and the F.A.A.

>> He was the person

who personally emailed the F.A.A.

asking for MCAS to be removed from the pilot manual.

That was an important piece of this, because we understood

that the F.A.A. really didn't know

that MCAS became more powerful.

>> He was speaking absolutely on behalf of the company.

This was not some low-level employee.

And he was asking for something

that was really quite substantial:

that a new piece of software,

that made the plane behave in ways that it previously hadn't,

be concealed from the pilots.

This is where the commercial pressures

from the executive level

come right down to the development of the airplane.

>> Mark Forkner certainly was not a lone actor in what he did.

He was following through on a policy by Boeing

to ensure that the program

did not have to put pilots in a flight simulator.

>> It got to the point where Mark Forkner got an award

for keeping training on the 737 MAX to a minimum.

>> NARRATOR: Nearly eight months after requesting

that MCAS be removed from pilot training manuals,

Forkner texted a colleague with a shocking realization.

>> This appears to be the moment

where Mark Forkner learns that MCAS has been expanded.

He writes in that message,

"I basically lied to the regulators, unknowingly."

>> But he never went back and corrected the record.

He never went back and fixed the error.

>> NARRATOR: Mark Forkner wouldn't speak to us.

He was indicted for lying

to F.A.A. investigators about MCAS,

but later found not guilty of all charges in federal court.

His lawyer told the "Times" reporters

that his communications with the F.A.A. were honest

and that "he would never jeopardize the safety

of other pilots or their passengers."

♪ ♪

When Boeing engineers expanded the MCAS system,

they included a feature that would make it

particularly dangerous.

>> Planes have millions of parts in them.

And there's one little one on the 737

that sticks out of the fuselage.

>> See that little black circle there?

That is called...

>> ...the angle of attack sensor.

>> On the 737 MAX,

it had the power to trigger MCAS.

>> It's the A.O.A. sensor that is one of the crucial parameters

to the computer

to tell the plane that it's in a perilous condition.

>> The angle of attack sensor would activate MCAS

by telling the system that the plane's nose was too high

and then MCAS would try to push the nose down.

>> But if this sensor is broken, for whatever reason,

MCAS never realizes,

and so it keeps pushing the nose of the plane down,

over and over again.

>> NARRATOR: Congressional investigators

would later find documents showing that Boeing engineers

had raised this very concern.

>> An engineer asked,

"What if we have a faulty A.O.A. sensor?"

Because A.O.A. sensors are known to be faulty.

You know, what happens to the airplane?

So you have those concerns raised, and the response is,

again, from Boeing engineers,

was to essentially dismiss those.

♪ ♪

>> Three, two, one...

>> NARRATOR: Boeing began delivering the new 737 MAX

in mid-2017.

>> At the outset, 737 MAX was

arguably one of Boeing's biggest successes.

It had become its best-selling jet ever.

>> NARRATOR: Advanced sales were estimated at $370 billion.

American had orders for 100,

Southwest Airlines for 200.

Boeing had focused especially hard on selling

to developing markets in Asia,

where Lion Air's parent company became the first customer

to fly the 737 MAX,

signing an agreement worth more than $20 billion.

>> Airlines loved it.

There was a yearslong waiting list to get one.

>> But Boeing's signature new jet had a fatal flaw.

>> Breaking news-- the search for wreckage

is underway after a passenger jet

with 189 people on board crashed.

>> A Lion Air Boeing 737.

>> A nearly brand-new Boeing...

>> NARRATOR: Investigators from the U.S. National Transportation

Safety Board contributed to an analysis

of what led to the Lion Air crash.

>> Leading up to the Lion Air accident,

the angle of attack probe itself was mis-calibrated.

The maintenance crew was not able

to properly identify this miscalibration.

>> An angle of attack sensor sent bad data to MCAS.

>> The plane thought it was in a stall

because of bad information.

>> And as a consequence of this angle of attack data error,

the MCAS activated

when it really shouldn't have.

>> Five months later,

almost the exact same thing happens

halfway across the world.

>> New 737 MAX 8 jetliner crashed today.

>> Investigators say that flight

had similar problems to the Lion Air crash.

>> Once again, the angle of attack sensor is malfunctioning.

>> There is this question now

about systems within the aircraft.

>> If MCAS hadn't been on those planes,

those planes wouldn't have crashed-- it's that simple.