Boeing’s ‘arrogant’ culture revealed in employees’ e-mails

The aviation company is still to recover its image following two fatal MAX crashes that claimed 346 lives and led to the grounding of the aircraft.

A series of e-mails sent by employees of Boeing reveal a lot of ‘arrogance’ in the Company’s culture.  The employees express that Boeing has always been focussed only on cutting costs and followed a casual approach to safety. These facts are of great significance considering the two fatal crashes of the 737 MAX aircraft in which 346 lives were lost.

The e-mails that covered about a 100 pages are dated between 2013 and 2018, and have been handed over to US lawmakers.

It seems that in the e-mails the employees have clearly revealed that they themselves would not risk allowing their families to fly in a MAX simulator-trained aircraft. Some of them who worked on the MAX simulators have complained of technical snags and difficulties too.

Most messages exchanged between employees seem to talk only of meeting schedules and not about ensuring quality. Clearly, suppliers with low rankings have been given contracts simply to cut costs, which led to the loss of innocent lives—something that could have been prevented.

In certain messages, the employees have even questioned the abilities and competence of the Company’s engineers, with some even calling the MAX ridiculous in terms of design.

The e-mails clearly reveal the contempt Boeing harboured for regulators and how casual the management was in its approach to safety. It had slipped in terms of training the pilots, just to avoid the huge costs involved in training. It had also flouted norms in order to obtain the green signal for the MAX aircraft.

The crashes claimed 346 lives and led to the plane’s worldwide grounding last March.

The e-mails will surely pose a challenge to David Calhoun, who is all set to join as CEO, and whose main task will be to salvage the image of the Company post grounding of the MAX aircraft and the two fatal crashes.