Boeing 737 MAX Concerns Drag on 4 Years
Excerpts from Fierce Electronics
Nearly four years after two Boeing 737 MAX crashes killed 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia, criticism is still being leveled at the aerospace giant for lack of complete public transparency concerning what happened.
“What is still needed is for Boeing to demonstrate complete and total humble transparency,” said independent expert Gregory Travis in an email to Fierce Electronics. “Not transparency inside the corporation as they say they are now going to do… but external transparency.”
Travis said Boeing “continues to refuse to divulge details of what it found [after the crashes] and what is has done to correct things. It is not being transparent and there is only one reason I can think of for it to not be transparent: it has things it wants to hide.”
Travis and a group of aviation safety experts have followed the multiple government investigations into the crashes since they occurred in late 2018 and early 2019. As a veteran instrument-rated pilot and career software engineer, Travis has focused primarily on deficiencies in a flight control software fix known as MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) used in the Boeing 737 MAX planes.
MCAS was “unbelievably deficient,” he said in 2020, “but it was the culture at Boeing that allowed this to happen.”
