Oct. 18, 2019 at 12:19 pm
1 of 3 | Grounded 737 MAX passenger planes are parked across East Marginal Way near the south end of Boeing Field. (Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)
By Dominic Gates and Steve Miletich Seattle Times staff reporters
Boeing’s MAX crisis deepened Friday with new controversy around an exchange of bantering texts between senior pilots that suggested Boeing knew as early as 2016 about the perils of a new flight control system later implicated in two crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people.
The text exchange in 2016 between the two lead technical pilots on the Boeing 737 MAX program was released Friday after regulators blew up at the company for belatedly disclosing the matter. The messages reveal that the flight control system, which two years later went haywire on the crash flights, was behaving aggressively and strangely in the pilots’ simulator sessions.
In the exchange, one of the pilots states that given the behavior of the system, known as Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), he had unknowingly lied to the FAA about its capabilities.
“It’s running rampant in the sim on me,” 737 Chief Technical Pilot Mark Forkner wrote to Patrik Gustavsson, who would succeed him as chief technical pilot. “I’m levelling off at like 4000 ft, 230 knots and the plane is trimming itself like craxy. I’m like, WHAT?” (Spelling errors in the original.)
“Granted, I suck at flying, but even this was egregious,” Forkner added.
The exchange shows that the aggressive behavior of MCAS was known to Boeing even ahead of flight testing, and that these top Boeing pilots were caught off guard by the system’s power.
Disclosure of the text chat between the pilots was followed Friday by the release of emails from Forkner that further called Boeing’s safety culture into question.
The emails show how Forkner, though he had experienced this errant behavior of MCAS, later urged the FAA to keep information about the system out of pilot manuals and MAX training courses.
The news came just ahead of CEO Dennis Muilenburg’s planned appearance before Congress on Oct. 30, and angered the very regulators who will soon decide whether to allow the 737 MAX to fly commercially again.
FAA shocked
Boeing has known about the text messages for many months. It provided the texts in February to the Department of Justice, which had opened a criminal investigation into the development of the 737 MAX, according to a person familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity about confidential legal proceedings.
However, Boeing only provided the messages on Thursday to the chief attorney for the Department of Transportation, the federal agency that includes the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
That delay prompted FAA Administrator Steve Dickson to write a short, sharply worded letter to Muilenburg Friday, declaring, “I expect your explanation immediately regarding the content of this document and Boeing’s delay in disclosing the document to the safety regulator.
Boeing said Friday that Muilenburg called Dickson in response, but it did not disclose details of the conversation.
According to the person familiar with the matter, after Boeing had given the messages to the Department of Justice, the company then spent months trying without success to get Forkner or his attorney to discuss the meaning of the texts.
Boeing did not provide the messages to the FAA because the criminal investigation presumably involved dealings between Boeing and FAA over the certification of the jetliner, according to the person.
News of the pilots’ message exchange, first reported Friday by Reuters, prompted a lacerating statement from Peter DeFazio (D-OR), chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, condemning “the outrageous instant message chain between two Boeing employees indicating Boeing withheld damning information from the FAA.”
The pilot union at Boeing’s most important 737 customer, Southwest Airlines, also weighed in with heavy criticism.
In a statement, Captain Jon Weaks, president of the Southwest Airline Pilots Association (SWAPA), said, “This is more evidence that Boeing misled pilots, government regulators and other aviation experts about the safety of the 737 MAX. It is clear that the company’s negligence and fraud put the flying public at risk.”
Lying to regulators
In the Nov. 15, 2o16, text exchange, Forkner tells Gustavsson that MCAS is now active down to Mach 0.2 — meaning at low speed, not just in the high speed maneuver for which it was originally designed. He adds that it will now be necessary to update the description of the system, presumably referring to material Boeing provides the FAA.
“So I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly),” he texted.
Another document released by DeFazio’s committee Friday is an email Forkner sent to an FAA official just over seven months earlier, on March 30, 2016, asking that MCAS be omitted from the pilot manuals and not mentioned in pilot training.