A year after the first of two crashes of a Boeing 737 Max with many fatalities, the head of the aircraft manufacturer, Dennis Muilenburg, has made a hearing in Washington. "We know we made mistakes and some things wrong," Muilenburg admitted on Tuesday in the Trade Committee of the US Senate.
Boeing will learn from the accidents, he said. The group has made changes to the model aircraft 737 Max, "to ensure that accidents like this never happen again."
Muilenburg had to hear harsh criticism on his first appearance in a committee on the accidents. Boeing has repeatedly served only half-truths, complained about Senator Tammy Duckworth from Illinois, where Boeing's headquarters. Another senator described the 737 Max as "flying coffins".
"Make a safe aircraft even safer"?
Exactly one year ago in Indonesia a 737 Max of the airline Lion Air crashed, 189 people were killed. In March, the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines machine of the same type claimed 157 lives. Since then, the aircraft model has remained on the ground worldwide.
The two machines were crashed according to previous findings, especially because of the faulty control software MCAS, which is to prevent a dive automatically.
The politicians took Muilenburg with questions about it, what Boeing knew when. The Boeing leadership is under great pressure to rebuild lost trust of airlines and their passengers. The fact that the Boeing 737 Max has not been allowed to fly for months around the world costs the aircraft manufacturer a lot of money and he has to expect compensation from airlines. In the third quarter, operating profit plummeted by about half.
So far, the management had denied hearings in the Capitol. Now, after the Senate hearing, Muilenburg has to answer questions from the House of Representatives. For months, Boeing had publicly taken no responsibility and only talked about making "a safe aircraft even safer". Meanwhile, the group has apparently changed its strategy. The afternoon after the hearing, the Boeing stock rose 0.6 percent to $ 343.03 on the New York Stock Exchange.
To ask if he would resign himself, the Boeing boss did not comment. Recently, Muilenburg had to hand over the chairmanship of the board of directors, which he held in a dual function with the operational chief position. Last week, the chief of the commercial aircraft division Kevin McAllister had to go because of the 737 crisis.
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Annoyance was caused by a recently disclosed internal information exchange from 2016, in which the then chief test pilot reported that the MCAS software had played crazy in the flight simulator. He had tricked the regulators over training requirements, wrote the pilot after documents, which were available to the news agency Reuters. Committee chair Roger Wicker told the Boeing chief that such statements revealed a "disturbing degree of casualness and frivolity."
Muilenburg apologized now and promised full cooperation with the air traffic control FAA. The agency has not yet approved the software updates and changes to customer information and pilot training required to release the 737 Max.
"These two accidents happened under my supervision"
Muilenburg said the software had been introduced incorrectly. For example, during the year-long approval process, Boeing had not informed the FAA for well over a year that a specific malfunction alert was not offered as a standard but only as an extra charge.
"These two accidents happened under my supervision, and I have a strong sense of responsibility," he said. Senator Wicker said last week that the 737 MAX "will only fly if 99.9 percent of the American public and American policy is convinced that it is completely safe."
Finally, Muilenburg was also asked why the Boeng 737 Max was not already served after the crash of the Lion Air machine. His answer: "If we could turn back the clock, we would make a different decision."
