Boeing works tirelessly to figure out the cause of any accident involving one of its planes and to keep it from happening again, CEO Dennis Muilenburg promised Monday, amid growing international scrutiny of two crashes that killed more than 300 people flying its best-selling 737 Max.
The Chicago-based planemaker is already working with global regulators reviewing the cause of an Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10 and will take action as “we understand necessary next steps,” Muilenburg said in a video posted to Boeing’s website. “Lives depend on the work we do at Boeing,” he added, and “our teams embrace that responsibility with a deep sense of purpose every day.”
The CEO’s comments came just days after aviation safety officials in Canada and the U.S. joined their international counterparts in grounding the 737 Max. Those decisions followed analysis of flight data transmitted to satellites from the doomed aircraft showed choppy ascents and descents during takeoff mirroring those before a Lion Air crash in Indonesia on Oct. 29.
In the Indonesian crash, a malfunctioning sensor on a 737-8 Max fed incorrect data on the airliner’s ascent vector to a computer system that attempted to lower the angle to avoid a stall, officials said. That prompted a struggle between new computer software — known as a Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS — and the pilot, who ultimately lost control of the aircraft.
All 189 people aboard were killed, and U.S. regulators ordered airlines to update operations manuals on the handling of such issues, and Boeing is installing a mandated software patch by April. The fact that the patch hadn’t been completed was part of what prompted the high level of concern after the Ethiopian crash, which occurred outside the capital of Addis Ababa, killing all of the plane’s 157 occupants.
In the aftermath, the Transportation Department’s inspector general is reviewing the Federal Aviation Administration’s initial certification of the 737 Max, the Wall Street Journal has reported.
The latest version of an airline industry workhorse, the aircraft is designed to be more fuel-efficient than its predecessors and competes directly with the Airbus A320neo. Boeing has garnered more than 4,600 orders for the single-aisle jetliner and was working to ramp production up to 57 a month prior to the Ethiopian crash, which would have netted a potential $30 billion in sales this year, according to Fitch Ratings, a firm that evaluates corporate debt.
Muilenburg, who assured President Trump personally of the aircraft’s reliability prior to its grounding, said Monday that his company “is committed to making safe airplanes even safer,” citing the software update. “We’ll keep striving to earn and keep the trust people have placed in Boeing.”
In the meantime, committees with aviation oversight authority in the Democratically controlled House and the Republican-led Senate have both promised hearings into the crashes, a move supported by James Hall, who chaired the independent National Transportation Safety Board from 1994 to 2001.
Boeing should have recommended sidelining the Max after the Lion Air crash, he told the Washington Examiner. That the plane not only kept flying but the U.S. was the last country to ground it show “possible gaps at the FAA and their knowledge and ability, with their funding and staffing, to oversee a company the size of Boeing,” he said.
