Boeing was "full speed" with the 737 Max to defeat Airbus as the largest aircraft manufacturer

The Boeing faced an unthinkable defection in the spring of 2011. American AirlinesBoeing's exclusive customer for over ten years, was ready to order hundreds of new fuel-efficient aircraft from one of the world's largest aerospace manufacturers, Airbus.

The executive director of American called Boeing's chief executive, W. James McNerney Jr., to tell him that the deal was going to be concluded. If Boeing wanted the company, he should be aggressive, told McNerney, the airline's executive, Gerard Arpey.

To conquer the American, Boeing abandoned the idea of ​​developing a new pbadenger aircraftit would take a decade. Instead, he decided to improve his workhorse 737, promising that the plane would be manufactured in six years.

The 737 Max was born about three months later.

The competitive pressure for the construction of the aircraft, which has permeated all design and development, now threatens Boeing's reputation and profits, after Two fatal accidents in the 737 Max in less than 5 months. Prosecutors and regulators are investigating whether efforts to design, produce and certify the Max have been precipitated, leading the Boeing to neglect critical safety risks and minimize the need for pilot training.

Investigators are still trying to determine the cause of the accident in Ethiopia this month and one in Indonesia in October, but they focus on newly installed software designed to avoid jams. The software was intended to compensate for larger and more fuel efficient engines and to ensure that the aircraft was flying the same way as a previous version.

Several months behind Airbus, Boeing had to catch up. The pace of work of 373 Max was frenetic. According to current and previous employees who spoke with The New York Times. Some spoke of the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Engineers were informed that engineers had to send drawings and technical drawings almost twice as fast as normal. In front of tight deadlines and a strict budget, officials quickly removed employees from other departments when someone left the Max project. Although the project was hectic, current and former employees said they have completed it by feeling confident in the safety of the aircraft.

The specter of Boeing's main rival was constant. Airbus was delivering more aircraft than Boeing for several years. And the loss of the US account would have been the end, which would have cost the manufacturer billions of lost sales and potentially thousands of jobs.

"They would not sit on the sidelines and let Airbus steal the market share," said Mike Renzelman, an engineer who retired in 2016 from the Boeing 737 Max flight control team.

Boeing did not seem upset at first by the A320neo, the aircraft of fuel economy announced by Airbus in 2010.

At a meeting in January of the following year, James F. Albaugh, executive director of Boeing's commercial aircraft division, told his employees that Airbus would likely exceed its budget by creating a model that companies did not really want, according to a business registration. meeting reviewed by The weather.

Mr. Albaugh has boasted that carriers are already paying more for Boeing's single-aisle aircraft than for the Airbus version. I have not seen the need to attack now. Boeing could wait until the end of the decade to produce a new plane from scratch, the executive said.

"I do not think we should worry too much about the fact that they make sales," he said.

For decades, Airbus was barely on Boeing's radar. A consortium created in 1970 by several European countries has been slow to compete on the world market. Boeing, founded in 1916, dominated the pbadenger aircraft market with 737 medium jet aircraft and 747 jet aircraft.

Then came John Leahy, an American who rose to the rank of Airbus sales manager in 1994. Leahy was relentless. Once, the CEO of an airline became ill at the time of the conclusion of an agreement. Leahy went to the man 's home and the executive signed the papers while wearing his bathrobe.

"Boeing thought we were lucky," Leahy said in an interview. "But he thought that there was no reason why we could not have 50% of the market."

Mr. Leahy was a resounding success in 1999, when JetBlue decided to launch a fleet entirely composed of Airbus A320s. In the years that followed, more and more low-cost companies around the world, such as easyJet, also placed large orders.

Airbus joined Boeing in 2005. "Boeing is struggling with the development work needed to lead the business in the 21st century"Said Tim Clark, president of the airline Dubai in Dubai that year, Airbus said:" He was braver, more brazen. "

In 2008, Airbus delivered 483 aircraft, compared with 375 for Boeing. Three years later, at the Paris International Air Show, Airbus had received orders for 730 aircraft valued at approximately US $ 72.2 billion. fuel efficient version.

"Boeing was totally arrogant to rule out the viability of the A320," said Scott Hamilton, managing director of Leeham, an aviation consulting firm.

While American was planning to place its largest order of aircraft in its history with Airbus in the spring of 2011, airline executives initially did not believe that Boeing thought the threat was real, according to one person involved in the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Airbus had a crew housed in a Ritz-Carlton suite in Dallas, near the US headquarters. Leahy went to Dallas and had dinner with the American boss, Arpey, in the Turtle Creek Mansion, a five-star hotel. Boeing visited them less frequently, according to several people involved in the sales process.

With American thinking about the planes to buy, Boeing made a business decision. A former Boeing manager said that the company chose to build the Max because it would be much faster, easier and cheaper They started from scratch and would allow airlines to save almost as much fuel.

In the end, American decided to make deals with Boeing and Airbus, each buying hundreds of planes. Arpey called McNerney again, this time reading a script to calibrate his words. First, he congratulated the Boeing boss for the agreement, according to a person familiar with the discussions. He then announced again that the American would also place an order with Airbus.

At Boeing, the race was underway. About six months after the project's launch, the engineers were already documenting the differences between Max and his predecessor, which means that they already had drafts for Max, a quick change, according to an engineer who worked on the project .

"The chronology was extremely compressed"The engineer said" it was going at full speed ".

A former team designer working on flight orders for Max said that on the occasion, the group had produced 16 technical drawings a week, double the normal fare. "Basically, they said: we need something now," said the designer.

A technician who badembles Max's wiring said that in the early months of development, hasty designers were giving him careless floor plans. He was told that wiring instructions would be cleaned later in the process.

His internal badembly designs for Max, he says, still include omissions today.for example by not specifying the tools to use to install a certain cable, a situation that could lead to a faulty connection. Normally, such plans include complex instructions.

Despite the intense atmosphere, current and former employees stated that during the course of the project, they felt that Boeing's internal quality controls guaranteed: the plane was safe.

In a statement, Boeing said: "The Max program was launched in 2011. It was offered to customers in September 2012. The solid configuration of the aircraft was completed in July 2013. The first 737 Max 8 have were completed at the Renton plant in November 2015. "

The company added: "A multi-year process could hardly be considered in a hurry".

At the heart of Boeing's strategy, there was the creation of an aircraft that was essentially the same as that of previous models, the 737, which is important for obtaining fast jet certification. This would also help limit the training that pilots would need, thus reducing costs for airlines.

Rick Ludtke, an engineer who helped design the 737 Max booth and spent 19 years at Boeing, said the company had established a rule of thumb for engineers: Limit changes to prevent pilots spending time training in a flight simulator before stealing the Max.

"None of the designs we created could provide new training that required a simulator," said Ludtke. "It was the first time."

When he updated the booth with digital signage, he said his team wanted to revise the information design to give pilots more data that was easier to read. But that might have required a new pilot training.

Instead, they simply recreated the mediators for several decades on screen. "We went from an badog presentation to a digital presentation," said Luctke. "The opportunities to make big jumps were many, but the training differences stopped us."

"This program has been a much stronger pressure pot than I have ever been," he added. "The company was trying to avoid costs and contain the level of change, it wanted minimal changes to simplify training differences, reduce costs and do it quickly."

Boeing said in a statement that the decision made in 2011 to build the Max had won out of other options, including the development of a new aircraft.

"The decision had to offer the best value for money to customers, including economy and deadlines, which was clearly an important factor," the company said. "Safety is our top priority when we design, build and support our planes."

A few months before Boeing's announcement by Max, Mr. Albaugh, director of the commercial aircraft industry, criticized Airbus' decision to revise the A320 with larger engines, which could change the aerodynamics and require significant modifications of the aircraft.

"It will be a design change that will happen in the plane," Albaugh said at the employee meeting.

"I think they'll find it harder than they think," he tells them. "When they are finished, they will have a plane that could be as good as the Next Generation 737", a plane launched by Boeing in 1997.

But the main selling point of the new A320 was its fuel-efficient engines. To match Airbus, Boeing needed to bademble the Max with its new larger and more powerful engines.

As Albaugh had predicted for Airbus, this decision triggered a cascade of changes. Larger engines have altered the aerodynamics of the aircraft, making it more likely to rise in certain circumstances.

To compensate for this possibility, Boeing added new software to Max, dubbed MCAS, which would automatically lower the dive if it detected that the plane was headed upward with a dangerous angle. The goal was to avoid stagnation. Because they badumed that the system would work in the background, Boeing felt that it was not necessary to inform pilots and regulators agreed. Pilots were not required to train on simulators.

The quest for automation was a philosophical change for Boeing, who had wanted for decades to keep pilots under control of the plane as much as possible. In comparison, Airbus tended to adopt technology, giving control to computers. The drivers who preferred the American manufacturer even had a saying: "If it's not Boeing, I will not go"

The researchers are now trying to identify the problems that occurred during the crash of Ethiopian Airlines and the Lion Air tragedy in Indonesia. In the Lion Air accident, a prominent theory was that the system was receiving erroneous data from a defective sensor, which caused an irrecoverable nose immersion. All 737 Max around the world are on the ground and Boeing did not give an estimate of when they could resume the flight.

In Renton, in the state of Washington, where the 737 Max is produced in a 1.1 million square foot factory, the mere possibility that Boeing's engineering contributed to accidents left a shadow over l & # 39; plant. Following the Lion Air accident, Boeing offered trauma counseling services to engineers who had worked in the aircraft.

"The members of my team are devastated by this situation," said Renzelmann, the former Boeing technical engineer. "It's a heavy burden."

In a statement, Boeing Executive Director Denis A. Muilenburg said he recently traveled to Renton. "I have seen first-hand the pride our people feel in their work and the pain we all feel in the light of these tragic events."

Boeing is working on an update of the MCAS software. The company met with airlines over the weekend to discuss the update, which should begin in April. He also intends to create an optional safety indicator in his standard cab in the new Max Jet.

Business is under increasing pressure airlines reconsider their orders and ask for compensation. But the work at Renton continues quickly.

Boeing now has a record of 52 Maxes for a month and aims to reach 57 in April. As fuselages and skeletons continued to enter the factory train last week, the teams were working 24 hours a day to make thousands more.