The cover story in The New York Times magazine for September 22, 2019, was entitled, “What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?” The writer, William Langewiesche—son of the sainted author of Stick and Rudder, Wolfgang Langewiesche—is a veteran of Flying, an experienced pilot, and a thorough and technically savvy researcher of his wide-ranging articles and books. As you can imagine, I read it eagerly.
Technicalities: The Story Behind the Boeing 737 Max Grounding
Key Takeaways:
- The article critiques William Langewiesche's *New York Times* piece, which controversially argued that the Boeing 737 Max crashes were primarily caused by the poor airmanship and inexperience of the crews involved.
- Langewiesche's position was that adequately trained pilots should have been able to disable the misbehaving MCAS system, similar to a trim runaway, attributing the failures to shortcomings in pilot experience within rapidly growing airlines.
- Both the article's author and pilot Chesley Sullenberger strongly disagreed with Langewiesche's primary conclusion, calling the MCAS a "fatally flawed design" and "death trap" that Boeing obscured and regulators failed to identify.
- They argued that Boeing made faulty assumptions about human performance in unexpected, cascading failures, contending that manufacturers are responsible for providing every advantage in emergencies, which Boeing failed to do.
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