Boeing 737 MAX: the price of rushing

The facts

In 2010, Airbus announced the A320neo with 15% more efficient engines. Boeing, caught off guard, had two options: design a completely new aircraft (high cost, 7-10 years) or re-engine the old 737 (faster, cheaper). Under pressure from shareholders and the board, CEO Jim McNerney chose the second path. The 737 MAX program was launched in 2011 with a promise of deliveries by 2017.

The problem: the new LEAP engines were larger and had to be mounted further forward and higher on the wings, altering the aerodynamic behavior. Instead of redesigning the landing gear or wings, Boeing added software — the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) — to automatically correct the aircraft's attitude in flight.

Critical decision: Boeing classified MCAS as a minor modification. This allowed avoiding additional pilot training hours (a strong sales argument: airlines didn't have to spend on retraining). Pilots were not informed of the system's existence. The MCAS depended on a single angle-of-attack sensor — without redundancy.

On October 29, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed into the Java Sea. 189 fatalities. Five months later, on March 10, 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed. 157 fatalities. In both cases, the MCAS repeatedly pushed the aircraft's nose down based on erroneous sensor readings.

The 737 MAX was grounded worldwide for 20 months. Total losses for Boeing exceeded $20 billion. In 2024, a door plug blowout on an Alaska Airlines flight reignited concerns about production quality. Boeing entered an unprecedented reputational crisis in its century-long history.

July 2026 Update

Nearly nine years after the disasters, Boeing is finally settling its accounts — at great cost.

Criminal case closed. In July 2024, the court rejected the plea deal proposed by the DoJ and Boeing. In May 2025, the Department of Justice reached a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with Boeing — effectively closing the federal criminal case for conspiracy to defraud the United States related to MCAS certification. Boeing paid a $243.6 million fine.

Spirit AeroSystems reacquired. Boeing completed the $4.7 billion acquisition of Spirit AeroSystems, the MAX 737 fuselage supplier whose quality shortcomings had contributed to the 2024 door plug blowout. Fuselage production has been brought back in-house — an implicit admission that outsourcing critical production had been a mistake.

MAX 7 weeks from certification. The FAA expects to certify the 737 MAX 7 by August 2026 — 13 years after the program's launch with Southwest Airlines. Over 80% of flight testing is complete, and the engine anti-icing system issue has been resolved. Approximately 24 finished MAX 7s are already parked at Moses Lake, Washington, ready for delivery. Southwest expects operations from Q1 2027. MAX 10 certification is expected by year-end 2026.

These resolutions do not change the DAMM analysis of the original decision — which remains one of the worst ever analyzed — but they demonstrate the time cost of ignoring the minimum move: it took nearly a decade and tens of billions to recover from choices that a second sensor and an hour of training would have prevented.

DAMM Analysis

Delimitation (2/10): Boeing never delimited the true nature of the decision. The choice wasn't "re-engine the 737 or not" — it was "how much safety risk are we willing to accept to save time and money?" But this question was never explicitly asked. The framing was always competitive ("we must beat Airbus") never about safety ("what is the minimum acceptable level of redundancy?"). The decision on single-sensor MCAS was made by engineers under schedule pressure, without management framing it as a fundamental safety decision.

Asymmetry (1/10): The asymmetry was catastrophic and completely ignored. The benefit of cutting testing and training was marginal: a few months earlier on deliveries, a few million saved on pilot training. The risk was loss of human lives, global grounding, billions in damages, destruction of a century-old brand. The cost/benefit ratio was irrational: saving hundreds of millions to risk tens of billions. But the corporate culture post-merger with McDonnell Douglas (1997) had shifted priorities from engineering quality to quarterly financial returns.

Room to Maneuver (2/10): After the 1997 merger, Boeing would have had 15 years to design a true 737 replacement. It didn't. After the MAX launch in 2011, it could have added MCAS redundancy before certification. It didn't. After the Lion Air crash, Boeing could have voluntarily grounded the fleet and fixed the system. It didn't — it took the Ethiopian Airlines crash and Chinese authorities' decision to force the grounding. Every window of margin was allowed to close by the combination of financial pressure and institutional denial.

Minimum Move (1/10): Boeing systematically did the opposite of the minimum move. The minimum move was: add a second sensor to MCAS (negligible cost), inform pilots of the system's existence, require specific training. Each of these actions could have prevented both disasters at minimal cost. Instead, Boeing optimized for certification speed and the commercial argument of "no additional training needed." The minimum move after Lion Air was obvious: voluntary grounding and immediate fix. Boeing chose to defend the system and continue flights.