Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing Highlight

Before its grounding, the MAX, in its limited service, had a fatal accident rate of one in every two hundred thousand flights—a frequency not seen since the early days of the jet age. By the count of a former Boeing executive who scoured incident reports for a congressional committee, one in twenty-five MAX planes experienced some sort of safety issue in the months after they were delivered. Despite that record, Boeing and U.S. aviation officials said the MAX was perfectly safe and let 157 people in Ethiopia file innocently into its cabin on a clear March day, just another routine flight.