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Congress recently cleared the Boeing 737 Max 10 jet for certification in the omnibus end-of-year spending bill without further safety enhancements. That step was taken despite significant opposition by those demanding a safety upgrade: from the union representing the 15,000 pilots at American Airlines; from the families of those killed in the aircraft's two deadly crashes in 2019; and from Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., chair of the House Transportation Committee, who led the key congressional investigation into the 737 Max crashes.
This rushed clearance stemmed from the pressure of lobbying by Boeing and its allies. It suggests that neither Boeing nor Congress learned the lesson of Boeing's earlier 737 Max fiasco: When 346 people lost their lives, Boeing lost $5 billion in direct revenue and over $25 billion when counting damage to the brand, and Boeing fired its CEO Dennis Muilenburg.
What caused the disaster at Boeing? At a high level, it was the company's desire to keep up with Airbus's newer, more fuel-efficient aircraft, the Airbus 320. To do this, Boeing rushed the production of the 737 Max and provided misleading information to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in order to receive fast approval for the plane. In the process, Boeing disregarded the safety systems that its own engineers had recommended and did not fix known software issues with the 737 Max, which ultimately led to the crashes.
The root cause of the disaster at Boeing can be traced back to a cognitive error known as normalcy bias. This bias causes people to overestimate the likelihood that things will continue as they have been and underestimate the potential consequences of a disaster.
Ironically, the transformation of the airline industry in recent decades to make airplanes much safer and accidents incredibly rare is key to understanding Boeing's mistake. The Boeing leadership was overconfident in the safety record of their airplanes and saw the FAA certification process as an obstacle to doing business rather than a necessary safety measure. This normalcy bias contributed to their decision to rush the production of the 737 Max and overlook known software concerns.
Boeing leadership felt great satisfaction in the safety record of the airplanes it produced over the last few decades — deservedly so, according to statistics on crashes. But in a classic case of the normalcy bias, it was apparently impossible, from their perspective, to imagine that the 737 Max might be less safe than those other recent-model airplanes. They saw the typical FAA certification process as simply another bureaucratic hassle that got in the way of doing business and competing with Airbus, as opposed to ensuring safety.
