Days after a Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 aircraft crashed in Iran, the release of a batch of internal messages has raised safety concerns about the company's 737 Max aircraft.
Internal messages raise safety concerns
According to BBC News, Boeing has handed over more than 100 pages of internal correspondence to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and lawmakers that contained harshly critical comments about the development of the 737 MAX, including one that said the plane was "designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys."
The messages also revealed attempts to bypass regulatory scrutiny and employees mocking the aircraft, the company, the FAA and foreign aviation regulators. In one of the exchanged messages dated 8 February 2018, while the aircraft was airborne, an employee asks another, "Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," to which the other staff member responds, "No."
"I still haven't been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year," a Boeing employee said in a different conversation in 2018, according to the documents. Some of the messages also exposed efforts made by Boeing to avoid pilot simulator training, an expensive and long-drawn process, for the 737 Max aircraft.
Boeing 737 Max involved in series of crashes
The Iran plane crash brings renewed attention to Boeing, which continues to deal with the fallout of two deadly crashes of the 737 Max model, over the last two years. In 2018, a 737 Max, billed as one of Boeing's newest and most advanced aircraft, operated by Lion Air crashed into the sea shortly after take-off from Jakarta, Indonesia. The crash claimed the lives of all 189 passengers and crew on board.
The aircraft once again grabbed headlines last year after an Ethiopian Airlines flight travelling from Ethiopia to Kenya crashed six minutes after take-off resulting in the death of 157 people on board. Both crashes left a combined total of 346 people dead, leading to the worldwide grounding of the aircraft. Boeing also fired its CEO in December amid the controversy.
