THE BOEING 737 MAX CRISIS

Episode 221 | Historical Events

In this History episode we focus on the Boeing 737 MAX crisis — two crashes, 346 dead, and a flight-control system called MCAS that most of the pilots flying the plane had never been told existed. Lion Air Flight 610 went down in October 2018. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 went down five months later. Both caused by the same system activating on a single faulty sensor, pushing the nose down more than twenty times before the crews lost control.

We trace the engineering decision that created MCAS, Boeing's decision to remove it from the pilot manual, the certification process in which Boeing effectively certified its own aircraft for the FAA, and the internal messages showing Boeing's chief technical pilot describing MCAS as "running rampant" during simulator tests. The FAA waited four days after the second crash to ground the plane — while regulators in China, Europe, and elsewhere had already acted. Boeing entered a deferred prosecution agreement and paid $2.5 billion. No executive was criminally convicted. And in January 2024, a door plug blew out of a 737 MAX 9 at altitude, raising the question of whether the manufacturing and oversight problems that produced the crisis had actually been fixed.

This podcast features narration with a synthetic AI voice.

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