Boeing Blames Its Two 737 MAX Jet Crashes On U.S. FAA Regulations- Demands Federal Compensation

Boeing management today released the result of an internally conducted study that found that its two Boeing 737 MAX Jet Crashes were caused by United States Federal Aviation Administration regulations.  Boeing demanded immediate action from Congress to compensate their company for all crash losses.  Their demand includes asking for Boeing to be compensated for the economic loses and reduced profits Boeing suffered due to worldwide grounding of 737 MAX jets that ensued following the cashes.

Boeing’s spokesperson for the occasion of the release of the report, Skip Ayres Ohsonize, explained that while everybody knows that regulation of American companies makes them less competitive and thereby weakens them, what the report revealed was something less obvious; that excess federal government regulation can foment unforeseen dangers as well. Mr. Ohsonize explained that federal regulation had essentially forced Boeing into designing a dangerous plane.

“Boeing, our company, was in an untenable position,” said Mr. Ohsonize.  Airbus SE the European multinational aerospace corporation, had moved into a position where it was taking the most airliner orders internationally and was poised to be take over the airliner market with increasing sales of its new A320 airliner.  “We weren’t going to stand by and let Airbus steal market share,” said Mr. Ohsonize, “that’s something that an American company has a duty to prevent, and we needed to move quickly.” The main selling point of the new A320 was its fuel-efficient engines. “We appropriately rushed to provide a Boeing alternative,” said Mr. Ohsonize, “that’s when the way in which F.A.A. regulations were unfortunately structured to slow us down if we took certain actions forced us into dangerous airplane design.”

Larger and powerful new engines were the key that was absolutely necessary to provide an airliner that would be able advertise competitive fuel efficiency.   Bigger engines to provide this fuel efficiency involve different airplane aerodynamics.  Mr. Ohsonize, said, “it is easy to understand that, without F.A.A. regulations factoring in, the obvious best way for us at Boeing to proceed would have been to design a new airliner from scratch.”

“But under F.A.A. regulations, it would have taken a decade to produce a new plane from scratch,” said Mr. Sogh Ahlphaul, an engineer contributing to the report for Boeing.  That’s because F.A.A. regulations would have required an extensive review certification process for any new airframe and fuselage, plus a brand new airline design would have required the purchasing airlines to spend millions of dollars on additional pilot training. “Facing competitive pressure from Airbus, we needed to avoid that,” said Mr. Ahlphaul.  He further explained:

Under the circumstances and needing to maintain profits, we were forced to go in the direction that F.A.A. regulations were clearly steering us: It was far quicker, easier and cheaper, and would provide almost as much fuel savings to mount larger engines on an existing airframe, and so we used the airframe of the earlier 737 models.

In other words, base the MAX would be one more member in Boeing’s “737 family,” a well-known design, rooted in the original 1967 certification of the B737-100.

Mr. Ahlphaul explained that “the F.A.A., for regulation purposes, would then allow us to say that this airplane was essentially the same as earlier 737 models, making it easy to certify it quickly.”  Moreover, this approach would limit any training that regulations might otherwise dictate that pilots could need, thus, he said, “cutting down costs for the purchasing airlines.”

Mr. Ohsonize, said:

Our report makes clear how the course the regulations drove us to take at Boeing was not optimal.  The old vintage airframe on which the new larger engines were mounted was designed with its wings very low to the ground, requiring more clearance for the larger engines.  That clearance could only be achieved by moving the engines forward.  Additionally, the landing gears also needed to be moved forward. This altered the aerodynamics of the plane, making it more likely to pitch up in some circumstances.  It made it harder to fly and it handled in an unstable fashion, with a tendency for the airplane to buck upward, very different in ways from what pilots, used to the classic 737 workhorse model from the days of yore, were familiar with.  These differences were mostly opposite to what pilots might intuitively understand from their previous experience.

“That’s why,” said Mr. Ahlphaul, “we interfaced the Artificial Intelligence automated MCAS system to let that robot system fly the plane while allowing pilots to feel like they were flying another plan entirely.”  The system would take care of adjustments to the aircraft and its behavior tendencies automatically, like automatic signals to the horizontal stabilizer to push the nose back down when it pitched up. Doing this avoided any need to retrain pilots.

The pilots could operate the plane the same way they operated prior iterations. “We could not let any designs we created be something where F.A.A. regulations would irksomely drive any new training that required a simulator; That was a first imperative,” said Mr. Ahlphaul.

Another bad decision the F.A.A. requirements forced, according to Mr. Ahlphaul, was the design of the cockpit instrument panel.  He explained:

When we updated the cockpit, actually ungraded to a digital display, we would have liked to have redesigned the layout of information to give pilots added data so they could have had information to track all the newly layered on idiosyncratic behaviors of the 737 MAX Jet design.  We could even have made the panel easier to read. That’s what we would have done absent F.A.A. Regulation, but, once again, when the constraints of F.A.A. regulations had to be considered, such a redesigned panel that did not accord with the notional conceit that, for regulatory purposes, pilots were flying 737 models, not something else, would have triggered an expensive regulatory requirement for new pilot training.

“It’s too bad regulations precluded this option,” supplied Mr. Ohsonize with emphasis, “because it could have helped the human pilots fill in some necessary blanks about their situation when the robot MCAS system failed to read sensors, as happened, contributing to the crashes.”

At the press conference where the report was released, Rahz Zellmann, a Boeing Senior Vice President, was on hand to state Boeing’s demands for the compensation it was demanding from the federal government for the damage. First off Mr. Zellmann wanted to be clear that the F.A.A. regulations were not Boeing’s fault.  He said that Boeing had been fighting for years to eliminate such regulations, and that Boeing had even succeeded in pushing through legal changes that reduced F.A.A. regulatory oversight, replacing it with Boeing having the power of self-certification in its factories, with more and more certification responsibilities being handed over to the manufacturers over the years. But Mr. Zellmann said that half-way measures of this kind were not enough.

Mr. Zellmann said that when self-certifications were coupled with old criteria and standards that remained applicable, Boeing engineers still wound up self-consciously distracted and looking over their shoulders thinking that if F.A.A. technical staff became had been fully aware of designs details and changes (including for instance with the MCAS robot guidance) the agency could likely require additional scrutiny.  “Engendering this kind of nervousness,” said Mr. Zellmann, “is not the same thing, as having the totally unencumbered ability you need to design freely and sidestep a meddlesome government.”  Mr. Zellmann said that self-certification had, however, allowed Boeing to achieve some benefits, such as determining that certain modern safety tools incorporated into newer editions of other airliners in 737 family, did not need to be included in the MAX because they were “impractical.”

Mr. Zellmann said that Boeing’s demand both for elimination of regulation and for compensation from the federal government ought now additionally to looked at, in an edifying way, through the lens of the Covid-19 coronavius crisis.  Zellmann noted that, taking into account the virus crisis, the Environment Protection Agency was indefinitely suspending enforcement of environmental laws.  According to Mr. Zellmann, that just goes to show how unimportant these laws actually are for protecting the public.  “They are half window dressing,” said Mr. Zellmann said, “and half an excuse for members of Congress to demand campaign contributions from the regulated firms as the expensive price to procure regulatory capture.”

“More important,” Mr. Zellmann said, “the corona virus crisis, comes at a time when it is crucial for the United States to remain strong.”  “This means,” said Mr. Zellmann, “that even if Boeing were not identifying the harms and losses Boeing suffered by virtue of the F.A.A. regulation, that at the present moment the federal government should be stepping up to give trillions to Boeing, because Boeing is one of the key military contractors requiring the most money from the United States to stay on a constant worldwide war footing.”  Zellmann made the point that the federal government could not afford to let grounded Boeing MAX jets financially weaken Boeing’s ability to keep the country strong and stand up to other countries during the coronavirus crisis.  Mr. Zellmann said that to protect the United States during the Covid-19 crisis it was essential for there to be as many military airplanes manufactured by Boeing to be able to make sure that countries like Iran were cut off from the medical supplies they needed so that the virus could multiple there and not here.           

“We benefit,” said Mr. Zellmann, “if we can assure that virus multiplication means that they have a far worse escalation of infectious cases within their borders than we do within ours.”  “It’s the kind of warfare you have to wage when to comes to germs,” said Mr. Zellmann. Said Mr. Zellman, “Boeing’s strong backup is a crucial ingredient to the U.S.’s intensification of sanctions against Iran to further weaken its healthcare system and economy during the during COVID-19 crisis.”

Mr. Zellmann said that with the Covid-19 crisis timing is everything: February wasn’t March and everything will certainly be different this coming month from the way it was in March.  He noted that Congress was acting quickly, as of a few days ago, to send trillions of dollars in Covid-19 bailout money to big corporations, of which Boeing naturally expected its share.  Mr. Zellmann said Boeing was releasing it’s report and demands for compensation at the beginning of this month to ensure that Congress didn’t move to unfairly prevent Boeing from getting everything is deserved with some sort of anti-double dipping provision, or anti-triple dipping provision.  That’s why, Mr. Zellman emphasized the official release date for the report is today, April 1st.