Flying Blind
The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
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4.5 • 60 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A suspenseful behind-the-scenes look at the dysfunction that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation: the 2018 and 2019 crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX.
An "authoritative, gripping and finely detailed narrative that charts the decline of one of the great American companies" (New York Times Book Review), from the award-winning reporter for Bloomberg.
Boeing is a century-old titan of industry. It played a major role in the early days of commercial flight, World War II bombing missions, and moon landings. The planemaker remains a cornerstone of the U.S. economy, as well as a linchpin in the awesome routine of modern air travel. But in 2018 and 2019, two crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 killed 346 people. The crashes exposed a shocking pattern of malfeasance, leading to the biggest crisis in the company’s history—and one of the costliest corporate scandals ever.
How did things go so horribly wrong at Boeing?
Flying Blind is the definitive exposé of the disasters that transfixed the world. Drawing from exclusive interviews with current and former employees of Boeing and the FAA; industry executives and analysts; and family members of the victims, it reveals how a broken corporate culture paved the way for catastrophe. It shows how in the race to beat the competition and reward top executives, Boeing skimped on testing, pressured employees to meet unrealistic deadlines, and convinced regulators to put planes into service without properly equipping them or their pilots for flight. It examines how the company, once a treasured American innovator, became obsessed with the bottom line, putting shareholders over customers, employees, and communities.
By Bloomberg investigative journalist Peter Robison, who covered Boeing as a beat reporter during the company’s fateful merger with McDonnell Douglas in the late ‘90s, this is the story of a business gone wildly off course. At once riveting and disturbing, it shows how an iconic company fell prey to a win-at-all-costs mentality, threatening an industry and endangering countless lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bloomberg reporter Robison debuts with a chilling account of the corporate mismanagement and regulatory failures that led to the crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplanes and the deaths of 346 people in 2018 and 2019. According to Robison, Boeing underwent a cultural shift in the 1990s and early 2000s, abandoning its technically proficient and ethically transparent production culture in favor of a shareholder-focused structure in which safety took a back seat to profit. The new strategy of pursuing "more for less" guided Boeing's redesign of the 737: to save time and money, technical complications were fixed with software solutions that pilots found difficult to troubleshoot, even though Boeing promised airlines the 737 MAX wouldn't require additional pilot training. Robison highlights how the Clinton and Bush administrations' restructuring of the FAA to adopt a more "customer service" approach to manufacturers allowed these and other issues to fly under the radar, until two crashes in the span of five months led to the grounding of the entire 737 MAX fleet for 20 months to make crucial fixes. Robison also profiles grieving family members who fought for a proper investigation into the crashes and successfully sued Boeing for damages. The result is a vital and enraging portrait of an avoidable tragedy.
Customer Reviews
Political grandstanding attenuates
The political grandstanding and ax grinding on conservative politics at the national scale mired what is otherwise a great forensic analysis of how the McDonnell Douglas merger created major cultural problems that caused Boeing’s second to none engineering culture to lose its way - with catastrophic consequences.