Since
Samya Stumo’s death in a 737 MAX crash, her parents and her
great-uncle, Ralph Nader, have devoted themselves to proving that the
company put profit over safety.
In the wake of the 737 MAX
disasters, caused by a software feature, Boeing and regulators
initially placed blame on the planes’ pilots. Then the Stumo family, who
lost their daughter, got involved. “I will never let Boeing forget
her,” a family member said.
Photo illustration by Paul Sahre
This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.
Samya
Stumo liked to ride pigs. This was on her family’s farm, in Sheffield,
Massachusetts. Caring for the pigs was one of her chores, so she would
hop on an old, dilapidated Army jeep and drive a water tank to the sty,
where she would fill the troughs and take a ride. She was nine years
old.
Samya had always been precocious. She started playing cello
when she was three, the year before her younger brother, Nels, became
ill with cancer. When her mother, Nadia Milleron, returned from the
hospital one day, Samya told her that she had learned to read.
Nels
died, at the age of two, shortly after Nadia had another son. The loss
played a role in Samya’s eventual choice of studies: public health. So
did the strain of activism in her family. Her mother’s uncle is Ralph
Nader, the transportation-safety crusader turned progressive advocate
and third-party Presidential candidate. Her father, Michael Stumo, who
grew up on a farm in Iowa, made frequent trips to Washington to lobby
for small manufacturers and family farmers.
For Samya and her two
surviving brothers, the family ethic was clear: seek justice for the
disadvantaged, even if it means challenging authority. Samya could carry
this to comic extremes. On a camping trip, she mounted a tree stump and
inveighed against the family’s patriarchal dynamics, while everyone
else, suppressing laughter, hurried to set up before dark.
In
2015, Samya graduated from the University of Massachusetts and won a
scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in global public health at the
University of Copenhagen. Afterward, when she was twenty-four, she got a
job with ThinkWell, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., which works
to expand health coverage in developing nations. ThinkWell sent her to
East Africa to open offices there. The night before she left, earlier
this year, she had dinner with Ralph Nader and his sister Claire.
During
a stopover in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, Samya texted her
family to say that she would arrive in Nairobi in a few hours. Then she
boarded Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. She sat in Row 16, beside a
Somali-American trucker from Minnesota. There were a hundred and
forty-nine passengers, from thirty-five countries, and eight crew
members.
The plane, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, took off at 8:38 A.M.,
on March 10th. A minute and a half later, it began to pitch downward. A
sensor on the nose had malfunctioned, triggering an automated control
system. The cockpit filled with a confusing array of audio and visual
warnings. The pilots tried to counter the downward movement, but the
automated system overrode them. Six minutes after takeoff, the plane
dived into the earth at five hundred and seventy-five miles per hour,
carving out a crater thirty-two feet deep and a hundred and thirty-one
feet long, and killing everyone on board.
That day, Stumo,
Milleron, and their younger son, Torleif, flew to Addis Ababa. The
crater had been cordoned off, but Milleron and Tor rushed past the
barrier. “It was mostly dirt,” Stumo said later. “Where’s the plane?
Where’s the pieces? This plane had just buried itself right straight
into the ground vertically and just disintegrated.”
This was the second crash of a 737 MAX
in five months, after a Lion Air jet plunged into the Java Sea, in late
October, 2018. Investigators quickly focussed on the automated system
that had pushed down both jets, a feature new to this model of the 737.
But a counter-narrative gained force, too: that the crashes were, above
all, the fault of insufficiently trained foreign pilots. “Procedures
were not completely followed,” Boeing’s C.E.O., Dennis Muilenburg, said,
at a contentious news conference in April.
It
has been more than a decade since a commercial-airline crash in the
United States resulted in fatalities, but airplane disasters are an
unwelcome reminder of the inherent risk of flying. Some 2.7 million
people fly on U.S. airlines every day; we’d rather not think about the
brazenness of launching ourselves thousands of miles in a fragile tube,
thirty thousand feet above the earth. The appeal of blaming foreign
pilots is easy to see. For the past eight months, however, the Stumo
family have dedicated themselves to demonstrating a scarier reality:
that Boeing, the pride of American manufacturing, prioritized financial
gain over safety, with the federal government as a collaborator.
Since
the crash, the family have made more than a dozen trips to Washington—a
routine they expect to continue: they recently found an apartment in
town. They have met separately with two dozen members of Congress, and
with the heads of the Federal Aviation Administration and the National
Transportation Safety Board, and testified before a House committee.
They were the first American family to sue Boeing, accusing the company
of gross negligence and recklessness. They have sought out
whistle-blowers and filed Freedom of Information requests. They got a
meeting for themselves and eleven other victims’ families with Elaine
Chao, the Secretary of Transportation. Afterward, they held a large
vigil outside the department’s headquarters. When the vigil broke up, I
talked with Gregory Travis, a software engineer and pilot who has
written extensively about the crashes. “Every past crash that I can
think of was an accident, in that there was something that wasn’t really
reasonably foreseeable,” Travis told me. “This was entirely different,
and I don’t think anyone understands that. This was a collision of
deregulation and Wall Street, and the tragic thing is that it was tragic. It was inevitable.”
I
met the Stumos in 1996, in Winsted, a former mill town of eight
thousand people in northwest Connecticut. After emigrating from Lebanon
in the nineteen-twenties, Milleron’s grandfather opened a restaurant
there. Her grandmother, Ralph Nader’s mother, lived in the town until
her death, in 2006, at ninety-nine. Nader still visits from Washington,
and his family funds two activists to monitor local affairs and bend
them in a progressive direction.
Milleron and Stumo met in law
school, at the University of Iowa, and afterward settled in Winsted,
moving into a house on Hillside Avenue and starting a family. First
Adnaan, then Samya, then Nels. They began attending an Orthodox
Christian church in a nearby town. Nadia worked part time, as a
court-appointed lawyer. Michael commuted twenty-five miles to a Hartford
law firm, and joined the Winsted school board.
I came to Winsted for my first job, at the Winsted Journal,
a weekly paper. At the first school-board meeting I covered, Michael
arrived late from Hartford. He was wearing a suit that hung loosely on
his lanky six-foot-one-inch frame. He carried a briefcase. He was only
twenty-nine, but he looked every bit the engaged citizen and responsible
father.
Michael and I met a few times at a gloomy bar on Main
Street, where he offered a wry perspective on Winsted politics and the
plight of small-town America. He invited me over for breakfast. I
remember warm sunlight, pancakes, small kids, and being impressed by
Nadia, a tall woman with long dark hair and an intently appraising gaze.
I
was soon gone from Winsted, to a daily paper near Hartford. In 1999,
after the birth of Tor and the death of Nels, the Stumo family bought a
ramshackle eighteenth-century house on a farm, over the Massachusetts
line. It had been owned by sheep farmers who published a magazine called
The Shepherd; old issues were strewn about the house,
and manure was piled four feet high in the barn. Michael worked for
months cleaning the house and clearing out the barn with a tractor.
A
year later, Nader ran for President as a member of the Green Party. He
had made his name in auto safety. In 1965, when he was thirty-one, he
published “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a book that focussed on the Chevrolet
Corvair, which he said had prioritized “stylistic pornography over
engineering integrity.” The book contrasted the negligent safety
standards of automobiles with the approach of airlines, in which safety
was encouraged by market reality. “Plane crashes . . . jeopardize the
attraction of flying for potential passengers and therefore strike at
the heart of the air transport economy,” he wrote. “They motivate
preventative efforts.”
A few months later, Nader testified before
Congress. His performance made his book a best-seller and spurred
consumers to abandon the Corvair. Improvements in car safety sparked by
his revelations contributed to a decades-long decline in highway
fatalities. In 1971, Nader founded Public Citizen, a nonprofit that
expanded his crusades to campaign finance, health care, and renewable
energy. In the eyes of many, he became an unimpeachable advocate for the
common good.
Nader ran for President in 1996, but his impact was
negligible. In 2000, he tried again, tapping into dissatisfaction with
Al Gore, the Democratic candidate. “Corporations were designed to be our
servants, not our masters,” Nader declared at a rally, at Madison
Square Garden, attended by fifteen thousand people. He got onto the
ballot in forty-three states and received nearly three million votes.
Many of his former admirers turned against him, however, regarding him
as a spoiler. In Florida, which George W. Bush won by five hundred and
thirty-seven votes, Nader received 97,488 votes.
Michael
Stumo bought two hundred pigs to raise without antibiotics, but they
got sick, the farm was quarantined, and he was forced to sell them at a
loss. Nadia, who raised poultry, managed better, selling three hundred
chickens and sixty turkeys one year. But her main focus was the
children, whom she homeschooled and drove to far-flung music lessons and
to church. When, at fourteen, Samya felt that she needed a more
challenging academic program, Nadia drove her to an early-college
program at Mary Baldwin University, in Virginia.
Michael rented
out part of their land and started spending more time on the issues we’d
talked about in Winsted. He developed ideas for antitrust and trade
policy, and in 2007 he helped found the Coalition for a Prosperous
America, to fight for small farmers and manufacturers—“producers,” he
called them—against large foreign rivals.
With backing from
farmers, unions, and manufacturers, he became a lobbyist. On one of his
trips to Washington, I met him in a House cafeteria, where he was fresh
from a short-lived win on trade policy. He flashed a gap-toothed smile,
unself-conscious about wearing a dress shirt tucked into shorts.
One
of the coalition’s board members was Stan Sorscher, an engineer at
Boeing and an official of the engineers’ union. Boeing was far larger
than the small companies Michael advocated for, but he viewed it as a
sort of “national champion” that the country should have more of. At a
time when many U.S. manufacturers were losing market share to global rivals, Boeing was the country’s largest exporter.
But
the company was in tremendous flux. When Sorscher first went to work
there, in 1980, after earning a doctorate in physics, he marvelled at
its culture, which emphasized quality improvement and communication.
Managers held regular meetings for engineers to address problems;
engineers worked directly with suppliers; teams shared resources,
knowing that the gesture would be reciprocated. The planes that Boeing
was developing—such as the 777, its first jet to use significant
computer controls—were a success, with few problems after launch.
In
December, 1996, Boeing announced that it was buying a struggling rival,
McDonnell Douglas, for thirteen billion dollars. Sorscher is one of
many Boeing employees who have identified the merger as the moment when
Boeing went from being led by engineers to being led by business
executives driven by stock performance.
Since
their daughter died, Michael Stumo and Nadia Milleron have made more
than a dozen trips to Washington. They are the first Americans to sue
Boeing over the crashes.
Photograph by Curran Hatleberg for The New Yorker
Sorscher
recalled a labor-management breakfast, shortly before the merger, at
which a top Boeing executive said that the company would reduce spending
on a program that employed engineers to find improvements in the
process of making planes. Sorscher, a member of the union’s bargaining
unit at the time, pointed out how much money process improvement was
saving the company.
The executive tipped his head back, as if
thinking how best to explain basic economics to a clueless scientist.
Finally, as Sorscher recalled, the executive said, “The decisions I make
have more influence over outcomes than all the decisions you make.”
Sorscher told me, “It was: ‘I can’t help but make a billion dollars
every time I pick up the phone. You people do things that save four
hundred thousand dollars, that take one shift out of flow time—who gives
a crap?’ ”
Three years later, the engineers’ union went on strike
over bonus pay and cuts in health coverage. James Dagnon, another
Boeing executive, said that engineers had to accept that they were no
longer the center of the universe. “We laughed,” Sorscher recalled.
“This is an engineering company—these are complex, heavily engineered
products. Of course we’re the center of the universe. But he wasn’t
kidding. We didn’t get it. Who is the center of the universe? It’s the
executives.”
In 2002, Sorscher, who had started working for the
union full time, made his case to a Wall Street analyst in Seattle,
arguing that bottom-line business models did not apply to building
airplanes. The analyst cut him off. “You think you’re different,” he
said, according to Sorscher. “This business model works for everyone. It
works for ladies’ garments, for running shoes, for hard drives, for
integrated circuits, and it will work for you.”
Taken aback,
Sorscher said, “Let’s build an airliner with this business model. If it
works, you and everyone who looks like you will be happy. And if I’m
right, then we’ll all be very unhappy.”
In the spring of 2004,
Boeing started designing the 787 Dreamliner, a
three-hundred-and-thirty-passenger jet. The following year, the company
named a new C.E.O., Jim McNerney, a Harvard M.B.A. who had worked at
Procter & Gamble, McKinsey, General Electric, and 3M. According to
Sorscher, under McNerney engineers were discouraged from voicing
concerns. “What we heard five thousand times was ‘Follow the plan,’ ”
Sorscher said. “ ‘Your job is to follow the plan, and if you can’t
follow the plan we’ll fire you and get someone to follow the plan.’ ”
By
the time the 787 was ready, in 2011, the program was three years late
and tens of billions of dollars over budget. A year later, after the
airplanes’ batteries displayed a tendency to catch fire, the fleet was
grounded for three months.
Nonetheless, the company’s finances
thrived. Between 2005 and 2015, the share price more than doubled, owing
in part to Boeing’s aggressive repurchasing of its own stock. “The
company has developed fail-safe systems for smoothing earnings, beating
expectations and jacking up demand for its shares with a precision that
rivals any jet that rolled off the assembly line in Boeing’s heyday,”
Maureen Tkacik wrote recently, in The New Republic.
Between 2013 and 2019, Boeing paid out $17.4 billion in dividends, more
than forty per cent of its profits. In his last three years as C.E.O.,
McNerney received eighty million dollars.
Despite
the stock rise, Richard Aboulafia, a prominent industry analyst, had
misgivings. In his January, 2013, newsletter, after an earnings call, he
fretted about Boeing’s unwillingness to learn from the Dreamliner
problems. “There was no contrition or soul-searching on the call about
how the 787 could have gone this wrong,” he wrote. “Instead, the call
emphasized some impressive sales and profit numbers. It was like a
farmer showing off a great crop, but not mentioning that the tractor
just broke, he fired the mechanic, and outsourced tractor maintenance to
Bolivia.”
The
government used to provide a counterweight to corporations that
compromised safety. Owing in great part to the activism of Nader and his
allies, in the late sixties and early seventies agencies such as the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission
were founded to protect citizens.
As early as 1971, however, there
was a backlash. That year, Lewis Powell, prior to serving on the
Supreme Court, wrote a memo calling on corporations to more aggressively
fight regulations. He singled Nader out as a threat, “a legend in his
own time and an idol of millions of
Americans.” Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, mocked what he considered to
be overbearing regulators: “The nine most terrifying words in the
English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ ”
Corporations portrayed tort lawyers as ambulance chasers seeking to make
a buck through frivolous litigation.
By the early nineties, it
was plain to Nader that the government was failing to regulate air
safety. In “Collision Course,” a book that he co-wrote with Wesley
J. Smith, they warned, “It is an unfortunate fact that government
oversight and enforcement is so underfunded and understaffed that
regulators and inspectors must rely upon the integrity and good faith of
those they regulate to obey the rules.” They continued, “If a company
is determined to cut corners, there is every likelihood that it will
succeed, at least for a while.”
The book was published in 1993. A
decade later, Boeing lobbyists began pushing for a wholesale shift in
regulatory oversight. For years, the F.A.A. had deployed “designated
engineering representatives,” who were based at manufacturers and
certified the safety of aircraft under development. The D.E.R.s were
typically employed by manufacturers, but they were selected by and
reported to the F.A.A.
In 2005, embracing the deregulatory agenda
promoted by the Bush Administration and the Republicans in Congress, the
F.A.A. changed to a model called Organization Designation
Authorization. Manufacturers would now select and supervise the safety
monitors. If the monitors saw something amiss, they would raise the
issue with their managers rather than with the F.A.A. By sparing
manufacturers the necessity of awaiting word from the F.A.A., proponents
of the change argued, the aviation industry could save twenty-five
billion dollars in the next decade.
At a meeting on the new
process, Sorscher said, “This is just designed for undue influence,” he
recalled. “ ‘No, no, no,’ they said. ‘This will work.’ ‘How will this
work?’ I said. ‘We have good people,’ they said. I said, ‘Good people in
a bad system is still a bad system.’ ”
Marc Ronell, who began
working in the F.A.A.’s Boston office after the change, told me that he
raised concerns with his manager, saying, “We’re paid by taxpayers to
protect the public. If we’re not protecting the public, who is?” The
response, he said, was: “It’s really Congress’s responsibility. Our job
is to serve the customer”—the company. Ronell, who has a Ph.D. in
computer science and engineering, was also disconcerted by many F.A.A.
engineers’ inexperience in vetting flight-control software. To train
engineers lacking a computer-science background, the F.A.A. sends them
to a two-week session in Oklahoma City. “You can’t substitute a two-week
course for a four-year degree,” Ronell said.
In
2009, the F.A.A. created the Boeing Aviation Safety Oversight Office, a
forty-person bureau in Seattle dedicated to serving Boeing, led by an
employee named Ali Bahrami. Four years later, Bahrami left the F.A.A. to
take a job with the Aerospace Industries Association, which lobbies for
Boeing and other manufacturers.
According
to a veteran F.A.A. engineer in Seattle, there has been constant
pressure from F.A.A. managers to delegate oversight of plane development
to Boeing. “The F.A.A. will tell you we do risk-based resource
targeting, that we put our resources where there’s the most risk,” he
told me. “That’s not true. The biggest focus is Boeing’s schedule.”
On October 28, 2018, a 737 MAX
8 flown by Lion Air took off from Bali, bound for Jakarta. Less than
six minutes into the flight, a cockpit alert signalled an impending
stall; the plane’s software directed the flight controls to point the
nose downward. This adjustment occurred three times in close succession,
but, each time, the crew, which included an off-duty pilot offering
assistance, managed to override it. The flight made it safely to
Jakarta.
The next day, the same plane, with a hundred and
eighty-one passengers and a new crew, took off from Jakarta. Almost
immediately, the control column began shaking violently, a warning that
the plane gives when it’s at risk of stalling. About three minutes into
the flight, the automated controls kicked in, and the plane dropped
seven hundred feet. The pilot, Bhavye Suneja, and his co-pilot, Harvino,
repeatedly tried to lift the nose by holding down the switch that
adjusted the stabilizer on the tail of the plane, but after ten seconds
the automated controls kicked in again, driving the nose back down. They
pulled frantically on the control column, but, twelve minutes into the
flight, the plane dropped five thousand feet at four hundred and fifty
miles per hour, into the Java Sea.
Boeing had conceived the 737 MAX
in 2011. That spring, American Airlines told Boeing that it was on the
verge of abandoning the older model of the 737, which had débuted in
1967 and undergone multiple updates, for Airbus’s A320neo, which was
more fuel-efficient. Boeing had been considering building an entirely
new jet, but it could take a decade to design a new plane and get it
through the full F.A.A. certification process. Airlines would also be
required to train their crews on the new planes. Desperate to retain
American, Boeing chose instead to overhaul the 737.
Updating the
plane introduced some engineering difficulties. The new model had larger
engines, and it was hard to find room for them on the low-slung 737.
Boeing decided to place the engines farther forward, just in
front of the wing. The new position, and the greater thrust of the
engines, produced an aerodynamic challenge during a maneuver called a
windup turn—a steep, banked spiral that brings a plane to the point of
stall, which is required for safety tests, though it’s rarely used in
typical flying. “On most airplanes, as you approach stall you can feel
it,” a veteran pilot for a U.S. commercial carrier told me. Instead of
the steadily increasing force on the control column that pilots were
used to feeling—and that F.A.A. guidelines required—the new engines
caused a loosening sensation.
To correct this, Boeing settled on a
software feature called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation
System. As the nose of the jet approached a high angle, suggesting an
oncoming stall, MCAS would adjust the stabilizer
on the plane’s tail, pushing the nose down, to alleviate the slackness
in the control column. “They were trying to make it feel the same, so
the pilots wouldn’t require training,” the pilot said. Boeing had gone
so far as to promise to pay Southwest Airlines, which flies 737s almost
exclusively, a million dollars per plane if training on a simulator was
found to be necessary.
Boeing considered the MCAS feature to be so minor that it removed mention of it from the 737 MAX’s
pilot manual. This meant that the Lion Air pilots had no idea why their
plane kept forcing itself downward: an angle-of-attack sensor on the
jet’s nose had malfunctioned, mistakenly signalling that the plane was
nearing a stall and leading MCAS to continually push the nose down—twenty-one times in all.
Nine days after the Lion Air crash, the F.A.A. issued an “airworthiness directive,” requiring an update of the 737 MAX’s
flight-operations manual. Boeing instructed pilots to deal with
excessive downward pitching by following the procedure for “runaway
trim”—the term for when the system that controls the angle of the
stabilizer malfunctions. The F.A.A. agreed that this notice would
suffice while Boeing came up with a software fix for MCAS, which it indicated would take about six weeks.
But
Boeing seemed to believe that pilot error had caused the crash. In its
response to an initial Indonesian government report, it highlighted the
contrasting reactions of the crew on the doomed flight and the crew the
day before, saying that the pilots on the second day had not followed
the standard “runaway trim” procedures.
One of Boeing’s senior
executives for sales in Southeast Asia at the time of the crash told me
that, at the company, the word was that the crash had been caused by
pilot error. Sales for the 737 MAX remained strong, and none of his customers were asking him about pilot training to address MCAS. “There was nothing I was concerned about at that point in time,” he said. “The stock was holding up O.K.”
On
December 17th, less than two months after the Lion Air crash, Boeing’s
board of directors approved a twenty-per-cent increase in the company
dividend and a twenty-billion-dollar stock-repurchase program, allowing
Muilenburg, who had replaced McNerney as C.E.O. in 2015, to carry out
even larger buybacks than in previous years. The board also awarded
Muilenburg a thirteen-million-dollar bonus.
On
March 10th, in the early hours of the morning, Nadia Milleron was at
the farmhouse taking care of Tor, who had a stomach virus. She turned on
BBC Radio, and heard that there had been an airplane crash in Ethiopia.
Samya’s
boyfriend, Mike Snavely, was on the night shift at a San Francisco
hospital, where he was doing his residency. He got a news alert on his
phone. Adnaan, Samya’s older brother, was in New Zealand, working
construction, his latest stop in a young adulthood that had included
hitchhiking to Alaska and sailing across the Atlantic in a
thirty-six-foot boat.
The three of them rushed to find which
flight Samya was on. Only after they reached Samya’s boss at ThinkWell
did Nadia wake Michael. “These things always happened to other people,”
Michael told me. “I thought, That can’t be, and found out that it was.”
Three
days later, Ralph Nader appeared on “Democracy Now,” the progressive
news program. Nader, who is eighty-five years old, talked about all the
good that Samya would have done for the world. “It was her first trip
under her new job to Africa,” he said. “Very enthusiastic. And she got
to Addis Ababa and boarded this”—he paused—“killer plane, the MAX, 737 MAX 8.”
In
Seattle, Stan Sorscher got a text from Michael, who was writing to let
the board of the Coalition for a Prosperous America know that he would
miss the annual trade conference. He was going to Ethiopia, he told
them, to collect his daughter’s body.
After
the family got to the crash site, they settled for less. “It’s a
beautiful place,” Michael said, at a memorial service held at the family
farm. “It’s on a rolling high plateau with beautiful vistas and views,
hawks everywhere, local agriculture, people plowing with cattle and a
single-bottom plow. And the Ethiopian people are beautiful—Nadia and Tor
were really at peace at that site. Samya loved East Africa, she loved
agriculture, she loved the people.”
Samya, in 2017, in Copenhagen, where she was studying global public health.
Courtesy Diana Isabel Sotomayor
Three
weeks after the crash, Michael, Nadia, and Adnaan flew to Chicago,
where Boeing has its headquarters, to file a lawsuit against the company in U.S. District Court. All of the more than three hundred and fifty 737 MAX
planes had been grounded, worldwide, but U.S. regulators were sending
signals that they would move quickly to get them back in the air. An
F.A.A. board proposed that future pilot training be done via iPads. The
agency was allowing only fourteen days for comments on the proposal.
Along with a half-dozen other families, the Stumos submitted a letter,
complaining that this was not enough time to mount a proper response,
and the comment period was extended to thirty days.
Boeing was desperate to get the 737 MAX
flying again—there were more than five thousand planes on back order,
with dozens coming off the assembly line every month. Muilenburg vowed
to make “safe airplanes even safer.” The Stumos saw it as their mission
to determine with certainty that the MAX was
safe—even if it meant training pilots on simulators and putting the
plane through full F.A.A. certification, a process that could last
several years. But these were short-term fixes. To prevent future
disasters, their goal was to strengthen the regulatory oversight that
had atrophied over time.
In early June, Nadia and her brother,
Tarek Milleron, flew to Washington, where Michael had secured meetings
with the leadership of the F.A.A. and the National Transportation Safety
Board. I accompanied them to an apartment in Northwest Washington to
pick up Paul Njoroge, a thirty-five-year-old Kenyan-Canadian banker who
had lost his entire family in the crash: his wife, their three young
children, and her mother. The Stumos had been trying to reach victims’
families around the world, and Njoroge was among the first to respond. A
trim, handsome man, he stood uncertainly in the apartment. He wore a
dark suit, and looked both well put-together and utterly at a loss.
We
drove downtown to a WeWork building, where we met Michael, and
discussed the day ahead. They agreed that Paul, who was especially angry
about efforts to blame foreign pilots for the crashes, would be the one
to confront F.A.A. officials on the issue. Paul said that he preferred
not to go on about the enormity of his loss, because he worried that the
officials’ expressions of sympathy would allow them to filibuster away
the meeting.
Nadia had every intention of talking about the loss
of her daughter. She said that she would tell them “what I experience
over and over again during the day, where I think about her fear and
terror.”
Paul said that he understood, but Nadia wasn’t done: “And
then I want to say that this body that was perfectly healthy was broken
into small bits that we don’t even have in one place, and that I am
overwhelmed by my grief.”
Again Paul tried to agree, but she
pressed on: “And I want to say, ‘Why didn’t you protect us? Why, with
all the resources of the United States, didn’t you make sure that the
plane my daughter was flying in was adequate to fly?’ ”
The
meeting at the F.A.A. left them frustrated. The agency’s interim chief
at the time, Daniel Elwell, refused to pledge to ground the 737 MAX
until all investigations had been completed, and he equivocated on
whether simulator training would be required for pilots. But, after the
meeting at the N.T.S.B., they left satisfied that the agency’s report on
the crashes would be rigorous, and grateful for a level of empathy they
felt had been lacking at the F.A.A. meeting.
Michael caught a
plane to Chicago, while the rest of us headed to Ralph Nader’s office,
on P Street. Nader offered Njoroge one of the “AXE THE MAX” pins he had designed, urging a boycott of the plane.
“Khali
Ralph,” Milleron said, using the Arabic term for maternal uncle.“Paul
is new to advocacy and trying to make things better and right in
aviation safety, for sure, but he is looking for your inspiration for
how to be effective.”
“That is the only thing that can motivate me
today,” Njoroge said. “Because, after this happens, I start asking
myself, What is the essence of life? And I find myself very demotivated.
What am I going to do with my life?”
“Is this your entire family?” Nader said.
“Yes, my entire family.”
The
man who had taken to Capitol Hill a half century earlier advised, “You
have a few months of opportunity—because of your loss—that very few
people have to get in the door. Door after door after door.” Nader
continued, “That requires study. You have to study the committees—who
they are, all that.”
“Yes, yes.”
“You’ll see who is slowing
down the hearings, who wants to push the hearings, who they want to
testify, who they don’t want to testify,” Nader said. “I would suggest
you make this . . .” He searched for the right word. “This is the one
that took your family,” he said. “You can learn all the players. All the
variables.” He suggested that Njoroge get the congressional handbook,
which lists the members of Congress and their committees.
There
was some pathos in Nader’s insights on Congress, which dated to another
era, when committees wielded more power, when staff had more expertise,
when members displayed more independence. His advice was infused with an
idealism bordering on nostalgia: this is how one would take one’s cause
to Congress, if Congress still functioned as it should.
The
Stumos returned to Washington a month later, for a hearing before the
House aviation subcommittee. They had attended two previous hearings,
holding a large poster with photographs of dozens of the Ethiopian Air
victims. This was the first time they were allowed to testify. As the
hearing was about to begin, Boeing announced that it was setting aside
fifty million dollars to help victims’ families, which the Stumos felt
was a transparent attempt to preëmpt the hearings.
At Michael’s
urging, Njoroge led off the testimony, memorializing his five lost
family members. Michael, who had testified at congressional hearings
before, handled the committee’s questions with ease. At one point, he
sketched out what future hearings on the 737 MAX
should include. “Any whistle-blowers who may have been fired, and maybe
have a gag order pursuant to a settlement—who have complained about
safety issues with regard to the 737 MAX—should
be called to testify, with protective subpoenas, so the public can hear
what they have to say,” he told the subcommittee. “The aviation-software
writers—do they have the same level of engineering safety culture as
regular aviation engineers?”
Michael’s restrained, lawyerly tone
reminded me of something he had told me weeks earlier about the many
meetings that he and Nadia had been having with members of Congress:
“Nadia would pound them over the head. I’m a little more Iowa about it.”
A
week later, Ali Bahrami, who in 2017 left lobbying to return to the
F.A.A. as its chief of aviation safety, appeared at a Senate hearing.
The Wall Street Journal had just reported that the F.A.A. had determined, after the Lion Air crash, that there was a high risk of another 737 MAX
emergency within the next ten months, but had decided to allow Boeing
to proceed with its software fix without grounding the planes. Bahrami
said, “From the safety perspective, we felt strongly that what we did
was adequate.”
Nadia was furious. At midnight, she and Tor started making signs—one read “FAA gambled 10 months and lost 346 lives.” At 2 A.M.,
they got into the car and drove to Washington. When they arrived at the
F.A.A., a Homeland Security officer refused to let them enter.
Eventually, they were called in to meet with Bahrami. As Tor related in a
recording that he made immediately afterward, they asked Bahrami what
he thought he could have done to prevent the Ethiopia crash. Bahrami
said that there was nothing he could have done. (Bahrami does not recall
saying this.) “I can tell you what you should’ve done,” Tor told him.
“You should have grounded the plane after the Indonesian crash.” Then he
and Nadia drove the seven hours back home.
In May, at the first House hearing on the 737 MAX,
the top-ranking Republican on the transportation committee, Sam Graves,
of Missouri, blamed the pilots. A pilot himself, he criticized Yared
Getachew, the Ethiopian Airlines pilot, for going too fast, making
recovery more difficult, and for following “no operating procedure that I
have heard of.” “You have to know how to fly the plane!” Graves said.
“It just bothers me that we continue to tear down our system based on
what has happened in another country.” Elwell, the interim F.A.A. chief,
said that the Ethiopian pilots should have overcome MCAS “via a checklist they should have memorized,” and that they “never controlled their air speed.”
In September, in the Times Magazine,
William Langewiesche, also a pilot, argued that inadequate pilot
training in countries like Indonesia was “just as guilty” in the 737 MAX
disasters as the planes’ malfunctions. The article suggested that
Boeing was being maligned, in a “public onslaught” that included
“exploitation of personal tragedy and the construction of a whole new
economic sector built around perceptions of the company’s liability.”
Pilot
training in Indonesia leaves a great deal to be desired. (Ethiopian
Airlines has long been held in higher regard—for one thing, the U.S.
paid for general training of the airline’s staff after it ordered forty
737 MAX planes, in 2015.) But to conclude that
pilot error was the overriding cause of the crashes requires downplaying
a string of revelations about Boeing, the 737 MAX, and the F.A.A. which began to emerge soon after the second crash.
The Seattle Times reported that MCAS
had initially been designed to be much weaker and to kick in only at
high airspeed, which is why Boeing allowed just one angle-of-attack
sensor to activate it. But the company later revised MCAS to deploy at lower airspeed, and with greater force—yet left it with just a single sensor for activation. Even as MCAS grew stronger, oversight of the system was delegated to Boeing. The New York Times reported that F.A.A. officials were surprised to learn crucial details about MCAS only after the Lion Air crash.
The
F.A.A. has said that it lacked the resources to oversee the plane’s
updates, but the veteran F.A.A. engineer in Seattle told me that this
was because of the way its Boeing office was set up by Ali Bahrami, with
only a few people assigned to flight controls. “There are forty-four
thousand people in the F.A.A.,” the engineer said. “But we don’t have
enough people to spend four hours to evaluate the MCAS safety assessment?”
The New York Times
reported that Boeing had offered a safety feature to alert pilots to a
faulty angle-of-attack sensor, but charged extra for it; neither of the
doomed planes had this equipment. The Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing’s assumption in designing MCAS was that, in the event of a malfunction, pilots would be able to respond properly within four seconds.
Taken
together, the reports suggested that Boeing had put all the risk on the
pilot, who would be expected to know what to do within seconds if a
system he didn’t know existed set off a welter of cockpit alerts and
forced the plane downward. “An airplane shouldn’t put itself in a
position where the pilots have to act heroically to save the plane,” the
veteran U.S. commercial-airline pilot told me. “Pilots shouldn’t have
to be superhuman. Planes are built to be flown by normal people.”
Gregory Travis, the pilot and software engineer, said, “MCAS sealed their fate. Everything that comes after that is noise.”
Chesley
Sullenberger, the pilot who, in 2009, saved a plane by crash-landing it
in the Hudson River, testified at a House hearing in June. “Boeing has
said that they did not categorize a failure of MCAS
as more critical because they assumed that pilot action would be the
safeguard,” he said. This was a mistake. “I can tell you first hand that
the startle factor is real and it’s huge—it absolutely interferes with
one’s ability to quickly analyze the crisis and take effective action.”
He said that he, too, had struggled in a 737 MAX
simulator after the crashes. “Even knowing what was going to happen, I
could see how crews could have run out of time before they could have
solved the problems,” he said. MCAS, he concluded, “was fatally flawed and should never have been approved.”
A recent battery of reports has confirmed this assessment. In September, the N.T.S.B. issued its first report on the 737 MAX, declaring that Boeing underestimated the cockpit chaos that would result from an MCAS
malfunction and the effect this would have on a pilot’s ability to
react quickly. A report by a task force made up of U.S. and
international regulators concluded that Boeing’s engineering
representatives faced “undue pressure.” The Indonesian government’s
final report on the Lion Air crash cited, among other factors, Boeing’s
failure to mention MCAS in the 737 MAX manual—the cockpit recorder captured the sound of the pilots riffling through pages in vain.
Currently, about seven hundred 737 MAX
planes have been grounded or are awaiting delivery, and it seems likely
that the plane’s return will stretch well into 2020. The F.A.A.’s
European counterpart has made plain that it now has so little faith in
Boeing and the F.A.A.’s ability to regulate the planes that it might
take the unprecedented step of withholding approval even after the
F.A.A. signs off.
The grounding has cost airlines some four billion dollars—Southwest Airlines, which has purchased more 737 MAX
by far than any other airline, has cancelled thousands of flights,
leading its pilots’ union to sue Boeing for lost pay. Boeing estimates
the total loss to the company at nine billion dollars and rising. Its
stock is down fifteen per cent since the Ethiopian crash, erasing
thirty-four billion dollars in value and prompting a shareholder
lawsuit.
The company has belatedly signalled that it recognizes
that its corporate evolution in the past couple of decades played a role
in the disaster. In September, an internal committee recommended that
top engineers report to the commercial-airplane division’s chief
engineer—in theory, a reassertion of expertise against the bottom-line
mind-set that Stan Sorscher and others deplored. Soon afterward, Boeing
replaced the head of its commercial-airplane division, and its board of
directors stripped Muilenburg of his title as the company’s chairman.
In
late October, Muilenburg testified before two congressional committees,
where he was challenged in light of a litany of new revelations. In
2015, a Boeing employee had asked in an e-mail, “Are we vulnerable to
single AOA sensor failures with the MCAS implementation?” The following year, the chief technical pilot for the 737 MAX told a colleague in a text that MCAS
was “running rampant” and “egregious” in a simulator. A June, 2018,
Boeing document stated that, if a pilot took more than ten seconds to
react to mistaken MCAS activation, the result could be “catastrophic.”
“If
we knew then what we know now, we would have grounded right after the
first accident,” Muilenburg testified. Yet he demurred repeatedly when
asked if the disasters revealed a need to rein in the F.A.A.’s
delegation of safety matters to Boeing.
The Stumos sat behind
Muilenburg at both hearings. At the second one, they were joined by
Nader, who clutched his congressional handbook. At the first hearing,
Muilenburg had opened by offering an apology to the families, but had
addressed it to the committee. As he was leaving the hearing, Nadia
Milleron called out, “Mr. Muilenburg, when you say you’re sorry to
someone, you turn to look at them.”
Muilenburg stopped, and looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
In
late June, Ralph Nader hosted a memorial service for victims of the
Ethiopian Airlines flight at the American Museum of Tort Law, in
Winsted, which he opened in 2015 in a former bank on Main Street.
It is an unusual museum. At the center of the main room sits a gleaming
red Chevy Corvair. Surrounding it are displays on victories for tort
law over corporate negligence, told with colorful illustrations:
tobacco, asbestos, the Ford Pinto. There is even a panel depicting
G.M.’s attempt to entrap the young Nader by sending a prostitute to
solicit him at a grocery store.
The memorial service was held in a
windowless, dimly lit room at the back of the museum. Richard
Blumenthal, the state’s senior senator, spoke, as did Joan Claybrook,
the former president of Public Citizen, who had sold all of her Boeing
stock and donated the proceeds to the museum in Samya’s memory.
But
the event was dominated by Nader. In March, I had seen him at the
service for Samya held at the farm. He sat by himself, with a plate of
Lebanese food, wearing a heavy coat and a woollen hat. I offered my
condolences. He nodded, then said, “I will never let Boeing forget her.”
At
the museum, he spoke about the underappreciated centrality of tort law
to American democracy—that the right of citizens to sue big corporations
for wrongdoing was no less important than the right to vote or to face a
jury of one’s peers.
There was pride and some defensiveness in
his remarks. But there was also a poignant subtext—Boeing was likely to
face a reckoning in court for the 737 MAX
precisely because the other part of the system that Nader had championed
over the years, government regulation, had failed so spectacularly.
Nader and his allies had long ago shown the harm done by unchecked
corporate greed, but they had been unable to stem the subsequent
undermining of government’s ability to do the checking.
“This is a
family that has risen to the occasion like similar families in other
tragedies to make sure it doesn’t happen to someone else,” Nader said.
“Their grief will never go away, but it is partially endurable by taking
the lead, on behalf of all of us who fly, to make sure that the
deterioration of the state of deregulation and corporate overreach will
not plague the safety of hundreds of millions of future airline
passengers.”
The
thought occurred to me then, as it would many times in the months to
come, that it was striking that this role should fall to this of all
families. It would be absurd to suggest that they had been preparing for
such a moment, but it was hard to imagine a family more prepared for
it. To put it another way: Accountability for the 737 MAX
would very likely have been more contained and more fleeting had Samya
Stumo not been a passenger on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.
Michael
was the last family member to speak. “We don’t want to be up front on
this,” he said. “We want to do something else. But we have to do this.”
A
few months later, I visited Michael and Nadia at the farm. It was the
first cold day of fall, and Michael was loading wood into the outdoor
boiler that heats the house. Nadia showed me two items of Samya’s that
had been retrieved from the site: her passport and a journal, both
drenched in jet fuel. Michael gave me a tour of his new barn and pointed
out improvements that he wanted to make. But he’d be paying someone
else to do them. “My whole life now is Boeing,” he said. ♦ ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
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