By The New York Times (U.S.) | Created at 2024-10-24 18:19:11 | Updated at 2024-10-24 20:23:20
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Newly revealed correspondence indicates that a Boeing senior official counseled that the company could answer a pilot’s safety questions, but it did not.
Oct. 24, 2024, 2:16 p.m. ET
The questions came in the form of an email on Dec. 1, 2018, to Boeing from the chief pilot at Ethiopian Airlines. They were detailed and filled with aviation jargon. One of them was 452 words.
But in essence the pilot was asking for direction. If we see a series of warnings on the new 737 Max, he posed, what do we do?
What ensued was an email conversation among a number of Boeing senior officials about whether they could answer the pilot’s questions without violating international restrictions on disseminating information about a crash while it was still under investigation.
That restriction was in play because a 737 Max flown by Lion Air had crashed a few weeks earlier leaving Indonesia.
The inquiry from Ethiopian Airlines would prove chillingly prescient because just months later one of its 737s would go down because of a flight control malfunction similar to the one that led to the Lion Air crash. The Ethiopian Airlines crash would kill everyone on board and leave questions about whether Boeing had done everything it could to inform pilots of what it had learned about the malfunction and how to handle it.
In response to the inquiry from Ethiopian Airlines, Boeing’s chief pilot, Jim Webb, proposed to his colleagues that he thank the airline for attending a previous briefing on the flight control system, called MCAS, but otherwise decline to answer the pilot’s first two questions and just refer the airline to training materials and previously issued guidance. Most of those on the email agreed.
