Things appear to only get worse for Boeing these days, and Thursday was no different, as the American company
disclosed more than a hundred pages of internal emails and instant messages to congressional investigators that showed employees describing cover-ups and concern over the safety of the 737 Max airliner. ...
The employees appear to discuss instances in which the company concealed such problems from the [Federal Aviation Administration] during the regulator’s certification of the simulators, which were used in the development of the Max, as well as in training for pilots who had not previously flown a 737.”
How bad was the employee chatter? Here’s a sampling:
• “I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year,” one employee said in a message in 2018 in an apparent reference to prior dealings with the FAA.
• “Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t,” one employee said to a colleague before the first crash in 2018. “No,” the colleague said.
• “This airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys,” an employee wrote in 2017.
The messages also show how the company pushed to reduce the scope of mandatory training for pilots to fly the new aircraft in order to cut costs. Regulators ultimately agreed to only mandate computer-based training, rather than full simulator training, for pilots with experience flying another model, the 737 NG.
