Boeing executives admitted to lawmakers in a tense hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday that the company made mistakes in developing its troubled 737 Max plane, grounded worldwide after two crashes killed 346 people.
It was Boeing’s most public admission that it botched the design of its highest-selling plane.
In a more than two-hour hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, lawmakers railed against CEO Dennis Muilenburg for safety problems with the plane and for not sufficiently informing pilots about changes it made to the new Max model of the jetliner that Boeing debuted in 1967. It was the first of Muilenburg’s two appearances in Congress this week about the two air disasters.
Muilenburg took a remorseful tone, recognizing mistakes with the plane. At times, senators were in disbelief after Muilenburg said he didn’t know until about the details of e-mail messages between a former Boeing pilot and the FAA in which the pilot boasted about “jedi-mind tricking” regulators into approving training materials and instructing the FAA to delete a flight-control system implicated in the two crashes.
“Can you see that this raises much concern about the level of concern about the level of coziness between Boeing personnel and FAA regulators?” asked Sen. Roger Wicker, R.-Miss., chairman of the committee.
“I understand the concern there,” Muilenburg said. “I can tell you the comments, the values, the approaches described in those emails are counter to our values. So I understand the concern, share the concern.”
The hearing was conducted on the first anniversary of the first crash — a nearly brand-new Lion Air 737 Max that went down in the Java Sea in Indonesia, killing all 189 aboard. An Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashed in March, less than five months later, killing all 157 people on board.
Family members of victims both crashes were in attendance, at one point holding up large photographs of their loved ones.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn, said Boeing executives came to his office after the crashes and said they were the result of “pilot error.” Blumenthal called the crashes “the result of a pattern of deliberate concealment” by Boeing.
“Those pilots never had a chance. These loved ones never had a chance,” he said. “They were in flying coffins as a the result of Boeing deciding it was going to conceal MCAS from the pilots.”
He was referring to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which was implicated in both crashes.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., the state where the 737 Max is produced, asked Muilenburg and the commercial airplane unit’s chief engineer whether its safety assumptions and assessments were wrong.
“In hindsight, yes,” said Boeing chief engineer John Hamilton.
“I do want to know that you are improving the safety culture,” Cantwell said.
A central issue is the flight-control system known as MCAS that malfunctioned on both flights because it received erroneous data from a faulty sensor. The sensor measures the angle of attack, or the angle of the plane relative to oncoming air. If the nose is pointed too high, the plane could stall, so the system automatically pushes the nose of the planes down.
In both crashes, pilots battled the system that repeatedly pushed the nose of the planes down. Pilots complained that they didn’t know the system was even on the plane until after the first crash.
Boeing has developed software fixes for the planes and additional redundancies but regulators haven’t yet signed off on them. The grounding, now in its eighth month, has dented airline profits and curbed their growth plans.
Hamilton said Boeing didn’t “specifically” test an unintended activation of the system because of an issue with an angle-of-attack sensor.
The FAA last week shut down the Florida maintenance facility that worked on one of the Lion Air sensors.
Boeing has been highly criticized for its assumptions about the plane, including overestimating average pilots’ ability to safely fly planes amid a flurry of cockpit alerts, which occurred on the Lion Air jet.
“We relied on these longstanding industry standards of pilot response,” said Muilenburg, adding that was an area where “we found shortfall.”
The hearing adds to pressure on Muilenburg. Boeing’s board on Oct. 11 stripped him of his chairmanship. The company later fired the head of the commercial airplane unit as the grounding dragged on.
Boeing shares were up close to 1% after the hearing.