Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing opens with the shocking crash of two Boeing 737 Max flights in 2018 and 2019, resulting in the deaths of 346 people. From there, Bloomberg reporter Peter Robison traces the roots of those tragedies to seismic changes within Boeing--a disturbing reflection of an increasingly profit-obsessed corporate leaders. Robison then takes readers back to Boeing's golden years, when the company made huge bets on behalf of its ambitious engineers as they parlayed their experience contracting for the military into the creation of soon-to-be-ubiquitous passenger planes like the 737.
While Flying Blind pays a great deal of attention to the mechanical failures that led to the 737 Max crashes, it is equally attentive to the corrosion of Boeing's corporate culture that led to those failings. A new era of Boeing leadership proved much less interested in the nuts and bolts of engineering successful planes than the savage cost-cutting and stock buybacks that enriched investors. Robison makes it clear that Boeing was by no means alone in embracing these values, tying the changes rocking Boeing to decades of federal deregulation and the emergence of hyper-aggressive CEOs like General Electric's Jack Welch. Robison's narrative distinguishes itself by showing how broader trends sweeping through the corporate world were fundamentally at odds with building exceptional, safe airplanes. Flying Blind is at its most convincing when bloodless corporate maneuvering is juxtaposed with the terrible human costs that result. --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader