Peter Robison

Corporate Culture Will Eat Itself

A history of the Boeing Company, from its founding at the dawn of flight in 1916, when young Washington State timber company executive William E. Boeing built his first seaplane, through the rise of commercial aviation in the 1950s through the '70s, when Boeing became a symbol of American workmanship and engineering, to 2019, when the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 out of Addis Ababa, months after the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 out of Jakarta, revealed the impact of decades of placing corporate profit over product quality and safety, and the aftermath (or more accurately, lack thereof) of those two crashes.

Peter Robison's book was first published in 2021 during the height of the pandemic, which so consumed international attention that events as recent as two years earlier seemed a distant memory. The book has received renewed interest in 2024, which began almost immediately with an incident on January 5, when the door of the Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane for Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 blew off in mid-flight due to a loose plug.

Robison describes the cast of characters in vivid, novel-like detail. One can envision the cast for the movie (or given the century-long timeline, TV miniseries) dramatizing this history. By putting noted actors' faces to the names and descriptions, such an adaptation would also address the book's greatest weakness, which is how it falls just short of fully humanizing the idealists-turned-cynics, the visionaries-turned-drones. One of these, a 50-something staff engineer for the Federal Aviation Administration named Richard Reed, is self-aware of his own fall. He takes to calling himself and his fellow FAA inspectors "Forrest Gumps" in reference to a scene in the 1994 film, in which the simple-minded titular hero is in basic training for the United States Army to deploy to Vietnam. When asked by his drill sergeant, "Why did you put that weapon together so quickly?" Gump replies, "Because you told me to." This, Reed says, is the answer he will give a Congressional committee when they ask him about his approval of faulty aircraft after Congressional legislation has also relegated the FAA engineers to rubber-stamps on the company in order to expedite the process of production: "Because you told me to."

Perhaps the most fallen figure in this drama, however, is Dennis Muilinberg, the chief executive officer of Boeing at the time of the plane crashes. An Iowa farmboy and devout member of the Dutch Reformed Church, he attends weekly Bible study meetings where they read from the Scriptures and Doing Business by the Good Book (2004) by David L. Steward, to learn to apply Christian principles to his corporate job. Muilinberg is almost pitiable when he is the only one to be emotional and apologetic while facing the Senate Commerce Committee and the families of those who died aboard Ethiopian Airlines 302. (He is less pitiable when he continues to compete in bike races between the crashes and the Congressional hearings on them.) Nonetheless, it is questionable how much he or any one other person, even one as high ranking as he was, could have done to change the corporate culture which had been firmly entrenched in the aerospace manufacturing industry in general and Boeing in specific for decades by then.

For that matter, the problem goes deeper still than clearly defined systems. It's easy to blame capitalism, for instance, but the Boeing of most of the 20th century, when designs such as the 777 Dreamliner set previously unimaginable standards for safety, was just as profit-driven and beholden to investors as its 21st-century progeny. Had the Dreamliner not proven profitable, the company would have folded well before it designed the severely flawed 737 MAX 8, the crashes of which cost the company billions more in stock market losses, canceled contracts and government fines than the development of the Dreamliner. Rather, it's as if the profit motive has become a self-propagating entity to itself, one which gobbles up the people and companies driven by it and eventually the very economic theory which necessitates it.

Like the true story, Robison's ends abruptly, for the same reason everything else - the release schedules of James Bond and Marvel Cinematic Universe films, the Tokyo Summer Olympics plans, U.S. election campaign strategies - ended abruptly in 2020. With the pandemic taking precedence over all other concerns, the bipartisan Congressional members ranging from Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) to Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who had vowed to hold the company responsible ultimately passed half-measures, and with the hit taken by the airlines, and by extension aerospace manufacturing industry, Boeing would be considered "too big to fail" and bailed out by private lenders.

(It's also possible another systemic ism played a role in the truncation of stiffer consequences for Boeing. Had the outrage begun after the crash of Lion Air 610 in November 2018, that would have bought the overseers five additional months of investigation and response. But 187 of the 189 people aboard Flight 610 were Indonesian citizens who did not warrant as much Western attention, and Boeing's false cover story of pilot error and inept airline staff was accepted with a collective shrug. One wonders if, had there been far fewer Westerners, including Americans, Canadians and Europeans, among the 157 aboard Ethiopian Airlines 302, the crackdown would have begun then, either.)

Yet like the film releases, sporting events and elections, the pandemic was not an ending, but a prolonged pause. Between January 5 and April 7, 2024, six nonfatal onboard incidents in flights departing from the U.S. and Australia and involving several Boeing models have reignited federal scrutiny and investor anxiety. Maybe by 2026, Robison will be able to write a sequel with a more satisfying conclusion.… (mehr)

This is a relentless, thorough examination of how Boeing, long a byword for quality and safety, became a cost-cutting, shareholder-beholden, soulless corporation. It demonstrates how Boeing gained outsize influence over the Federal Aviation Administration, essentially setting things up so that the FAA reported to Boeing, not the other way around. It traces every step of the journey to the fatal flights of the 737 MAX and showcases just how far the firm deviated from safety in its pursuit of profit. This book nods to The Last Nine Minutes: The Story of Flight 981, by Moira Johnston (another great book) and talks about the parallels between Boeing and NASA when NASA was preparing to launch the Challenger shuttle. So if you’ve read the Moira Johnston book or anything about Challenger (e.g., The Challenger Launch Decision, by Diane Vaughan; or Truth, Lies and O-Rings, by Allan MacDonald), you will likely find Flying Blind interesting as well.… (mehr)