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A former Boeing official who played a key role in the development of the 737 MAX has refused to provide documents sought by federal prosecutors investigating two fatal crashes of the jetliner, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination... Mark Forkner, Boeing’s chief technical pilot on the MAX project, invoked the privilege in response to a grand jury subpoena issued by U.S. Justice Department prosecutors looking into the design and certification of the plane, the person said. Invoking the Fifth to avoid testifying, while a legal right, is sometimes interpreted as an admission of guilt. Its use to resist a...

Almost as soon as the wheels of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 spun free from the runway March 10, the instruments in front of Capt. Yared Getachew went haywire. The digital displays for altitude, airspeed and other basic information showed dramatically different readings from those in front of his co-pilot. The controls in Capt. Getachew’s hands started shaking to warn him the plane was climbing too steeply and was in imminent danger of falling from the sky. Soon, a cascade of warning tones and colored lights and mechanical voices filled the cockpit. The pilots spoke in clipped bursts. “Command!” Capt. Getachew...

SEATTLE — In the days after the first crash of Boeing’s 737 Max, engineers at the Federal Aviation Administration came to a troubling realization: They didn’t fully understand the automated system that helped send the plane into a nose-dive, killing everyone on board. Engineers at the agency scoured their files for information about the system designed to help avoid stalls. They didn’t find much. Regulators had never independently assessed the risks of the dangerous software known as MCAS when they approved the plane in 2017. More than a dozen current and former employees at the F.A.A. and Boeing who spoke...

The 737 Max has been grounded since mid-March following two fatal crashes. Investigators implicated a piece of new flight-control software in both air disasters that repeatedly pushed the nose of the planes downward. A total of 346 people were killed in the two crashes. The manufacturer on Wednesday posted the biggest quarterly loss in its history as costs piled up and it took a nearly $5 billion charge to compensate airlines affected by the worldwide grounding of the 737 Max, now in its fifth month. Boeing's $4.9 billion charge and the $1.7 billion increase in costs related to the 737...

Boeing has bested Airbus as the world's largest aircraft maker for most of this decade. That's about to change in dramatic fashion. Airbus' commanding lead is especially significant because the race between the two companies has historically been tight. Last year, for example, Boeing delivered 806 aircraft last year to Airbus' 800. 2015 was the only year this decade in which one of the two airplane manufacturers delivered 100 more planes than the other. The gap between them is almost certainly going to get wider. Boeing has not been able to deliver any of its bestselling 737 Max planes since...

link only https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers

(WIkipedia...."During the certification process, the FAA delegated many evaluations to Boeing, allowing the manufacturer to review their own product.[48][49] It was widely reported that Boeing pushed to expedite approval of the 737 MAX to compete with the Airbus A320neo. That aircraft hit the market nine months ahead of Boeing's model.") Article excerpt... ...During his time as President of the United States, Barack Obama promoted the sale of Boeing planes—including the 737 Max 8 planes—around the world. In November 2011, in Bali, Indonesia, President Obama announced an agreement between Boeing and Lion Air. "For the last several days I’ve been talking...

While the crashes remain under investigation, preliminary reports showed that a new stabilization system pushed both planes into steep nosedives from which the pilots could not recover. The issue is known in aviation vernacular as runaway stabilizer trim. In simulator tests, government pilots discovered that a microprocessor failure could push the nose of the plane toward the ground. It is not known whether the microprocessor played a role in either crash. When testing the potential failure of the microprocessor in the simulators, "it was difficult for the test pilots to recover in a matter of seconds," one of the sources...

FULL TITLE: Boeing Has So Many Grounded 737 Max Planes Waiting to Be Fixed They're Parking Them in the Employee Parking Lot You may recall that, thanks to an issue with faulty sensors in the Boeing 737 Max flight control systems, those planes have been grounded after multiple crashes were found to be related to the issue. Grounded planes are, by definition, not in the air, and as such need to be stored, on the ground, somewhere. In the case of Boeing’s Renton Factory in Washington state, there’s so many grounded planes that some of that ground has to be...

Speaking at a final press conference from Le Bourget airfield outside the French capital on Thursday, Airbus sales chief Christian Scherer said the European planemaker never received a request for proposals—a document that formally launches bidding for most major aircraft contracts—from IAG SA, the owner of British Airways. The secret negotiations between Boeing and IAG led to the biggest surprise of the week-long show: a letter of intent from the carrier to purchase 200 of the Max aircraft, a model that is grounded following two fatal crashes. IAG is currently an Airbus-only narrow-body customer and has said it plans to...

PARIS — The leadership of Airbus appeared at a press briefing ahead of the Paris Air Show on the company’s 50th anniversary with an all-new team and a new style. Chief executive Guillaume Faury led the group, talking about the company’s plans not only to automate and digitize production but to address concerns over climate change by “inventing the decarbonized aviation of the future.” He was followed by new sales chief Christian Scherer, who proved a solid replacement for his firebrand predecessor John Leahy by not only talking up the Airbus jets but declaring their vast superiority to Boeing’s airplane...

It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors. The Max software -- plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw -- was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs. Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have...

Federal prosecutors have subpoenaed records from Boeing relating to the production of the 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina, where there have been allegations of shoddy work, according to two sources familiar with the investigation. The subpoena was issued by the Department of Justice (DOJ), the sources said. DOJ is also conducting a criminal investigation into the certification and design of the 737 MAX after two deadly crashes of that jetliner. The 787 subpoena significantly widens the scope of the DOJ’s scrutiny of safety issues at Boeing. The two sources who revealed the subpoena spoke on condition of anonymity because of...

Bloomberg Link

Boeing Co. won a huge endorsement for its troubled 737 Max aircraft: The parent company of British Airways promised to build its future short-haul fleet around the model with a plan to buy 200 jets. In a commitment valued at $24 billion, IAG signed a letter of intent to take the single-aisle planes between 2023 and 2027, Boeing announced Tuesday. It was the first deal for the 737 Max since the plane — the best-selling model in Boeing’s history — was grounded in March after two deadly crashes. The pact ends months of unrelenting bad news for Boeing’s flagship aircraft,...

The company is arguing for the cases to be moved from the US to Indonesia. Fighting the case overseas would also most likely place Boeing under less scrutiny for its conduct around the crash, given the different legal culture and the logistical difficulty of meaningfully prosecuting Boeing thousands of miles from its US base. In a statement to Business Insider, Boeing said its intention was to avoid a prolonged court battle "so that those affected can receive compensation without the need for prolonged litigation." Reaching a settlement is something Boeing had privately raised with the plaintiffs before this statement. Brian...

American Airlines (AAL +2.1%) is weighing whether to buy Airbus' (OTCPK:EADSY +3.2%) proposed A321XLR aircraft as a potential replacement for its aging fleet of 34 Boeing (BA +1.2%) 757-200 jets, Bloomberg reports. The proposed XLR variant plane, with a redesigned fuel tank that would extend the range of an existing long-distance A321 version by as many as 900 nautical miles, would be able to fly from American's Dallas hub to central Europe. American is one of a handful of carriers whose fleet decisions will play an outsized role as Airbus and Boeing vie for dominance in a middle-distance segment that...

Miami After takeoff, the Boeing 737 suddenly warns pilots that the plane is about to lose lift and stall, an erroneous signal from a bad sensor. The control column shakes, loudly. Pilot Roddy Guthrie diagnoses the problem—and then the plane’s nose suddenly pitches down, on its own. Emergency No. 2. He pulls back on the control column to keep climbing and gets the airplane back to the proper orientation, nose up. But it happens again, with more force. And then a third time, with even more force, so that he’s looking almost straight down at the ground—the most terrifying sight...

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said he would trust his own family in a 737 Max jet after testing new software in the wake of two deadly crashes. O'Donnell: The first crash, Flight 610 that crashed into the Java Sea about 12 minutes after takeoff killed 189 people on board. What's your understanding of what brought that flight down? Muilenburg: Well first of all, I have to respect the fact that the investigation process is still going on. We know there was inaccurate sensor data that came into the airplane and there appeared to be a maintenance issue with that sensor....

Before last month’s crash of a flight that began in Ethiopia, Boeing Co. said in a legal document that large, upgraded 737s “cannot be used at what are referred to as ‘high/hot’ airports." At an elevation of 7,657 feet -- or more than a mile high -- Addis Ababa’s Bole International Airport falls into that category. High elevations require longer runways and faster speeds for takeoff. The Ethiopian airport’s altitude hasn’t been cited as a factor in the downing of Flight 302 and likely didn’t cause the crash. But it could have exacerbated the situation because an airplane’s performance degrades...