Free Republic

Documents sent to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Thursday by aircraft manufacturer Boeing included conversations between the company's employees who talked about getting the agency to approve the now-beleaguered 737 Max airplanes while concealing problems with the product, The New York Times reports. Many of the messages handed over to the agency included conversations detailing the software and flight simulator problems for the aircrafts that were withheld from the FAA, the newspaper reported. “I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year,” one of the employees said in documented messages from 2018, referencing their...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz ripped into embattled Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg at a high-profile Senate hearing on Tuesday, criticizing the manufacturer’s response to two deadly 737 Max plane crashes and questioning the company’s safety culture. The Republican zeroed in on recently released internal Boeing messages that appear to show top officials raising concerns as early as 2016 about the flight-control system at fault in the crashes. In those exchanges – described by Cruz as “stunning” – Boeing’s chief technical pilot for the 737 Max told a co-worker that the system in question was “running rampant” in simulator tests and that...

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...

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...

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...

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....