It was the Perry Mason moment of the hearings that riveted the world. As Boeing C.E.O. Dennis Muilenburg—sweaty, teary, apologetic, but still robotically defensive of his company—sat before Congress in October 2019, he faced hostile questions from Texas senator Ted Cruz. The subject was a set of smoking-gun internal messages between two Boeing pilots.
One pilot had experienced a hairy ride in a 737 MAX simulator, months before that plane was to be delivered to airlines—apparently the result of faulty software design, the kind of glitch that should have been ironed out months, if not years, prior. The software would later be blamed for two deadly crashes of the MAX (in the Java Sea, shortly after taking off from Jakarta, in October of 2018; and in Ethiopia, shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa, in March of 2019).
