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Was The Shift in Boeing’s Company Culture to Blame For The 737 MAX Tragedies?

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In the new book, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy And The Fall Of Boeing, author Peter Robison details the fall of one of America’s great companies. Boeing was once renowned for its engineering prowess, but it was a change in their company culture that led to design flaws in their most profitable airplane. The company’s current crisis was brought about by the two crashes of it’s 737 MAX airplanes in 2019, only 5 months apart – killing 346 people.

Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company, was started in 1916 by American lumber baron William E. Boeing. After crashing his first plane, Boeing realized he could build his own in the time it would take to get replacement parts. He hired engineers George Westervelt and Wong Tsu, a M.I.T. grad, to improve the design of the plane he’d crashed, and a few months later the “B&W” seaplane took its maiden flight.

Their first financial success was when the Navy ordered over 50 Model C’s for World War I. From the start, Boeing relied on its engineers and for decades their executives were careful to note Wong Tsu’s efforts especially, while becoming the world dominant aircraft manufacturer. 

Robison points out that Boeing’s culture of listening to its engineers and making a habit of considering their input was key to their success. He says, “There was a saying at Boeing as it was hiring people at one point that we hire engineers and other people. And it prided itself in the way that it was ultimately all about the airplane.”

Coming after WWII, the jet age was a time of more collective culture in both corporations and government. And the culture at Boeing was to build the best product possible. Designing and building planes is a very expensive endeavor. Robison mentions “There was always a saying that managers should plan for 20,000 surprises in any airplane program.”

He gives several examples in “Flying Blind” of times where issues were found late in the testing phase, and they simply went back and fixed them – at significant cost. There was even one instance where an instructor was found to be at fault for a crash, but the lead test pilot thought it showed ways in which the design could be improved upon. Robison says, “So the pilot went to the engineers, who said, we will fix it, and Boeing fixed it.”

So if the company culture was so great, what happened?

Well the culture began to change in the late 1990’s and that coincided with the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas Corp. Many within Boeing felt this was the beginning of a long descent into a focus on profit over safety. With the merger came a conflict of cultures: Boeing’s groundbreaking engineering vs. McDonnell Douglas’s philosophy of maximizing shareholder value.

Historic wisdom tells us “no man can serve two masters,” and Boeing’s focus on design and safety slowly gave way to the bottom line. Instead of listening to its engineers, it was heeding the bean counters. And unfortunately that cost not only innovation, but safety.

By committing itself to cost-cutting measures, Boeing started making very different choices than they historically would have. As they outsourced work, hired non-union pilots and moved pieces of the work to different states, communication broke down. Each part of the process of designing and building aircraft took on a feel of individual tasks instead of the collective experience it used to be. Engineers that had taken pride in putting safety first as a company, were being told to stick to the schedule and cut costs.

Ultimately, the two crashes in 2016 were due to design flaws that were ignored by Boeing and not caught by the FAA.

In the old order of Boeing’s culture, they would have taken the extra time and money to fix these flaws before it ever came to a loss of life. But the newer culture of “shareholder value over safety” and embracing “strategies of cost-cutting, outsourcing, union busting and co-opting regulators” according to Robison, allowed these tragedies to occur.

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