A Boeing contrive was concerned that the troubled 737 Max, years before it came to market, had a flight-control system that lacked enough safeguards, according to a document released Wednesday during a tense hearing in the House where lawmakers hammered the maker’s CEO over two fatal crashes of the jetliners, and repeatedly asked why he hasn’t resigned or given up his pay.
Other documents released during the informed entertaining included a Boeing manager’s concerns about the high pace of production at a Boeing 737 production facility months in front of the crashes, while another document highlighted assumptions about how quickly pilots could respond to a malfunction on meals.
The more than five-hour hearing Wednesday caps two days of brutal questioning by lawmakers of beleaguered CEO Dennis Muilenburg on Capitol Hill this week. Those embodied calls that he forgo his salary this year and questions over why he hasn’t resigned in the wake of the crashes that smothered 346 people. Boeing isn’t handing out executive bonuses this year, a spokesman told CNBC.
The hearings underscored have relations federal regulators didn’t do enough to police the plane’s design before they certified it as safe for passengers in 2017, and they put Boeing’s CEO on the defensive almost flight safety assumptions and questions that the company prioritized profit over safety.
Crash victims’ offspring members attended both hearings, holding up photographs of their loved ones at times. Muilenburg said he hasn’t tendered his resignation. He repeatedly said that his upbringing on an Iowa farm taught him to see the problem through.
When Muilenburg quoted his background, a group of victims’ relatives said “go back to to the farm” during the hearing, a woman sitting in the group said after the find out. “It has come to the point where you are not the person anymore to solve the situation,” the woman told Muilenburg after the hearing.
In one of the biggest discoveries of the House hearing, in 2015, more than a year before the planes were certified by federal regulators, a Boeing intrigue asked whether a flight-control system that was involved in both deadly crashes was safe because it relied on a sole sensor.
Regulators around the world banned airlines from flying the planes after the crashes. Boeing has changed the skids’ system so that they rely on two sensors instead of one. But regulators have not yet signed off on that and other changes the suite has made to the planes, leaving them grounded for nearly eight months, which has crimped airline profits.
The sensors, which gauge the angle of attack, or angle of the plane relative to oncoming air, feed an anti-stall system on the 737 Max. Erroneous data from a sensor triggered the method, known as MCAS, during the two crashes — one in Indonesia in October 2018 followed by another in Ethiopia in March. The crashes extinguished all 346 people on the flights.
“Are we vulnerable to single AOA sensor sensor failures with the MCAS implementation or is there some control that occurs?” asked the engineer in a December 2015 email. The Federal Aviation Administration approved the planes in 2017 and they are Boeing’s bestseller.
Informant: U.S. Government
The email was obtained in an investigation of the planes by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, which the committee’s chairman, Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., contemplated was the largest in the committee’s history.
Chief engineer of Boeing’s commercial airplane unit, John Hamilton, said the attention showed that the company’s employees do raise questions “in an open culture” and that it was part of its “thorough process” to judge how many sensors to use.
But DeFazio asked why they didn’t include data from two sensors earlier.
“If you can do it now … why didn’t you do it from Day 1?” DeFazio Muilenburg. “Why not accept that redundancy?”
Muilenburg responded, “We’ve asked ourselves that same question over and over and if back then we grasped everything we know now we would have made a different decision.”
The CEO added that Boeing intended to extend the abilities of a system that had a history of more than 200 million safe flight hours.
“One of our principles is to take whole systems and then incrementally extend them,” Muilenburg said. “We’ve learned since then, and that’s how we’ve moved to this new draft.”
In another revelation, a manager of Boeing’s 737 program said in a 2018 email that employees were “spent” while the company ramped up production of its biggest moneymaker to meet growing demand.
Because of the schedule pressures, hands were “either deliberately or unconsciously circumventing established processes.”
“Frankly right now all my internal warning bells are common off,” said the email. “And for the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane.”
Muilenburg responded that he was hep of the email and those concerns and that the company took steps to address those concerns.
A separate Boeing record about MCAS from June 2018, four months before Lion Air Flight 610 crashed in Indonesia, warned that dim reaction times to runaway trim, which can push the nose of the plane down, could be “catastrophic” if pilots degrade more than 10 seconds to react and said it found a typical reaction time was four seconds.
Lawmakers and cover experts have criticized Boeing for underestimating the impact of a flurry of cockpit alerts on pilot response times.
Muilenburg, who has been CEO since 2015, also stick up for his staying in the job and declined to say whether he would give up his pay this year. The board stripped him of his chairmanship earlier this month. The following also ousted the head of the commercial aircraft unit.
“You’re no longer an Iowa farm boy,” said DeFazio. “You are the CEO of the largest aircraft fabricator in the world. You’re earning a heck of a lot of money, and so far the consequence to you has been, oh, you’re not chairman of the board anymore.”
WATCH: Families hold photos of 737 Max victims