I'm Bethany McClane. This is making a killing in this show. I cut through the hype and handwringing to reframe the stories you thought you understood and uncover the ones you didn't know were important. On October twenty ninth, twenty eighteen, Lion Air flight six ten took off from Jakarta and crashed into the Javacy, killing all one hundred and eighty nine passengers and crew aboard. Less than five months later, on March tenth, two, nineteen, Ethiopian Airlines flight three O
two crashed over the countryside, killing everyone on board. What a grim opening for this episode. Put stick with me as the world now knows. Both planes were Bowing seven thirty seven Max jets, a new model that had become
the fastest selling plane ever in between the crashes. Bowing said this, as our customers and their passengers continue to fly the seven thirty seven Max to hundreds of destinations around the world every day, they have our assurance that the seven thirty seven Max is as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies. But it would turn out that Boeing allegedly knew there was a problem with a key sensor back in twenty seventeen, long before
the crashes, and there's more to the story. With the Max's grounding in March. Boeing has now had two airplanes taken out of the sky by the Federal Aviation Administration in six years, following battery fires on its Dreamliner in twenty thirteen. The last model the FAA grounded was the McDonald Douglas DC ten back in nineteen seventy nine. Now Boeing is facing congressional scrutiny, lawsuits, and public fury in spades.
At the company's annual meeting in Chicago in April, family members of crash victims stood outside in a driving rain, holding up photos of loved ones and signs reading prosecute bowing and exacts from manslaughter and Boeing's arrogance kills. How could this happen to Boeing, which was supposed to represent
everything that was best about American manufacturing. Bloomberg writer Peter Robeson conducted more than a dozen interviews with former employees and FAA inspectors, and went through hundreds of pages of internal emails and records, and a piece entitled former Boeing Engineers Say relentless cost cutting sacrifice safety. He writes this the crisis is best understood as part of a larger drama that's played out as Boeing has reshaped its workforce
in an all consuming focus on shareholder value. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Theoretically, the company that makes the best, safest product wins competitions should engender a race to the top, not a race to the bottom. Good business practices and good profits should go hand in hand. Helf forget the theory. We have actual proof that this is the way it works. There are famous examples from
business history. Who can forget Paul O'Neill, who, as Alcoa's newly minted CEO, gave a speech to the Wall Street investment community in nineteen eighty seven in which he spoke not about profits and cost cutting, but rather about worker safety. He said his goal in the company was to reach zero injuries. When an analyst asked him about company inventories, O'Neill replied, I'm not certain you heard me. If you want to understand how alco is doing, you need to
look at our workplace safety figures. By the time O'Neill retired in two thousand, Alcoa's market cap had grown nine hundred percent and worker injuries had dropped to a meniscular level. Has something changed today? So many companies operate in an environment of fear. Fear that they'll be taken over if earning sag, or if they lose ground to a competitor, Fear that an activist investor will oust management, thereby ending their rich paychecks. In that pressured environment, what gets sacrificed
on the altar of more profits? Now, if this could happen to Boeing, what's the lesson for other companies? I'm thrilled to have Peter here with me from Seattle. After starting on the Boeing beat in nineteen ninety eight and then leaving that beat and then coming back to it, what was your reaction to how the company had changed?
I suppose it was surprise, mostly because the background chatter and grumbling that I've been hearing twenty years ago from engineers about how Boeing was moving away from an engineering focus and was only worried about Shecherholder return seemed to be coming true. And usually that kind of grumbling remains grumbling among employees, and it doesn't have what seems to be such drastic effects, And according to engineers I talked to for this story, it's the culmination of years of
cost cutting that was aimed at increasing Boeing's profitability. So you started to hear this grumbling twenty years ago. Yeah, Boeing had bought McDonald douglass, and at that time there was a real diversion in the culture between the two companies. McDonald Douglass I've heard described as sort of hunter killer assassins of business, and the Boeing people at that time
were described as boy scouts. And Boeing had always been a very engineer dominated company, many of its CEOs had been engineer, but McDonald douglass under Harry stone Cipher was very interested in shareholder return and part of the way that they tried to do that was by outsourcing a lot of the technology and expertise to other companies to keep their own costs down. And that tension was just starting to play out when I started covering Boeing back
in ninety eight. That's so interesting that the seeds of this could have implanted so long ago. How was it Do you think that the acquired company's culture ended up becoming the dominant one. How does that happen? I think part of the answer is in the style of Phil Condit, who was the CEO at that time. He talked about
trying to merge the two companies. The story he told at the time was that he drew two boxes on a paper and put himself in one and Harry Stonecipher in the other, and he said they would work as a team. As it turned out, according to people I talked to, what happened because McDonald douglas executives were more aggressive and we're more used to the sort of corporate infighting, is that the McDonald douglass style became ascendant and within a few years Harry stone Cipher was running the company.
Do you think it also what played out at Boeing tells a larger story of changes in the business world too. In other words, that grumbling that started twenty years ago. If our business world hadn't remained and become increasingly relentlessly focused on shareholder value, maybe it would have played out differently. Does it tell a larger story of how the business climate overall has changed? I think it does because what happened at Boeing is very similar to what happened at
other companies which are manufacturing base. They shifted production overseas and did whatever they could to reduce costs. In Boeing's case, that happened in some cases, but you didn't see the effects for much longer because it takes so much longer
to develop planes. But you know, the people that I talked to find it interesting that the all new planes that have been or the new models that have come out since Boeing bought McDonald Douglass are the seventy seven Dreamliner and the seven thirty seven Max, both of which have been grounded by the FAA, and that had not happened to Boeing before. So let's back up to the specifics of your story. You begin the story with this anecdote about level D training. Why did you choose that?
And what larger picture does that tell? It sounds arcane and technical, but it's important because Level D training signifies a kind of training that the FAA requires. That means any pilots flying this new model have to undergo simulator training.
Simulator training is expensive for airlines. It's also disruptive. They have to run many hundreds or even thousands of pilots through this training, so it disrupts their flight schedules, and so Boeing at the time was trying to catch up with Airbus, which had a competing model that was running
about a year ahead in the planning to Boeings. And so, according to Rick Ludkey, who's been one of the more outspoken former Boeing engineers managers from the start, said, you know, whatever designs come up with, they cannot require Level D training,
which means no simulator training. So that's what they did, and according to him, it may have led to some shortcuts in the design and ultimately it led to pilots getting about an hour of training on an iPad instead of undergoing a full simulator training on this new model. That's shocking. An hour of training on an iPad. Yeah, it used to be that pilots would carry their flight manuals around in those square suit cases that you would see them rolling in airports. But they've shifted all their
training onto iPad. It's still an hour of training. And it's really interesting the picture that paints your A story begins with one of those perfect anecdotes that really does sum up this much larger issue. So what role. Did the fierce competition with Airbus play? I mean, theoretically you think of competition as this thing that should make everybody do better, right, But it appears to have been a
more destructive force in this case. Is that fair? It may have been it just because Airbus had an advantage in that It's A three twenty is about twenty five years newer, and so the newer models of the Airbus A three twenty had a more seamless similarity to the previous models. And also they use electrical controls. The seven thirty seven had originally been fled by wire, which means
hydraulically controlled. So it's an older plane that Boeing is sort of jury rigging electrical control into try to make it have modern handling, and according to people I talked to, it ended up with this pury rigged system that was confusing to pilots. Ultimately, And why did competition have this negative impact instead of being a positive one. Is it simply that in today's world, Boeing just couldn't risk losing to Airbus for even a short period of time that
it would have taken to make a truly better plane. Yeah. I think the thing that both of them try to do with These models are very high volume, and they're the highest source of income for the companies, and they need to keep their assembly lines full. And if Boeing had let air Bus get ahead of it with the A three twenty, I think the thing, the thing that surprising the most was that American Airlines had said that
it planned to order the A three twenty. American as a bed rock customer of Boeings, and only twenty years ago American had said that it would order only Boeing planes for twenty years. Airbus saying that they wanted to switch to the E three twenty was a critical moment for Boeing, and at that point they launched the seven thirty seven Max, which they hadn't been planning on doing for several more years. I have this thing that business stories are always stories about people. So let's let's start
with Dennis Mullenberg. Who is he? Dennis Mullenberg grew up in Iowa on a farm. He tells a story frequently about having gone to college at Iowa State and wanting to grow up to become the world's best airplane designer. And he had an internship at Boeing in Seattle and the first time he'd been there for the summer. This is in the mid eighties, and after he graduated, he started at Boeing and he remained at Boeing. He's a lifer.
He's been there thirty plus years, so among the engineers that there's a sense that he is one of them, although at the same time there's been a lot of disappointment in his public statements because he seems to huge these legalistic formulations that seem partly designed to prevent liability for Boeing, and he seems to struggle with connecting emotionally. I had someone early on say it sounded like Boeing statements were written by a lawyer and an engineer, which
is not surprising because they were so Muhlenberg. I also find interesting because it seems like the kind of crisis that might push out a CEO. But at this point, the shares are are hanging pretty tough, and partly that's because it is a duopoly, and ultimately airlines may not have much choice, at least until new entrants in China enter the market. I want to come back to that
because that's a truly frightening point. You also write about Muhlenberg that he's somebody despite his engineering background, he's somebody who also pushed for cost cutting, right he is. But before this story in Business Week, we wrote another story a year ago at a time when Boeing was writing about as high as it ever had, at least in the time that I've been covering it. It had seen its shares triple in the space of a few years and was really taking over the mantle from GE, as
you know, the America's industrial champion. And partly that was because Muhlenberg had followed his predecessor, Jim McNerney, who was a former GE executive, in pushing for cost cuts, pushing suppliers to reduce their prices. They had a program called Partnering for Success, which the suppliers grumbled was called pilfering from suppliers. So that's part of the backdrop here, is that Boeing an n Airbus had been pushing the system for lower prices and cost cuts for years and years.
So is GE going all the way back to Jack Welch? Is toe the source of all evil? I mean, I'm kidding, But some of this relentless focus on earnings traces its way back to Jack Welch right in the ge culture. Yeah, it's definitely an element of it here. One issue is that Boeing. Boeing's incentives have pushed it to reduce its cost of capital. That top executives are compensated based on a measure that penalizes them for the cost of capital,
so they have more incentive to outsource work. They have more incentive to return cash to shareholders, which which they've done, and shareholders have profited handsomely, as have the top executives. We had a stat that Muhlenberg and McNerney his predecessor, just since twenty twelve have taken in two hundred million
plus and bonuses and stock awards. And do you think it's as simple as greed that makes people conform or push such metrics or is there a fear component too, and that if they don't deliver, shareholders will find somebody else who will. I think it's more the fear components.
That there's a moment that I described in the story where the top executives at Boeing were really fearful that they would be taken over or pushed out in some fashion at a meeting in ninety eight, Phil Condit called his top managers together and said the stock price was so depressed that Boeing could be taken over, which seems unthinkable, But at the times its price was only thirty bucks or so, and now it's three hundred and fifty or so,
and in today's era of activist investing and private equity, it's actually not unthinkable, right exactly. And we think this is interesting because there's a component of reality to that fear, right, It's not just a desire for executives to put more money in their pocket or focus on shareholder value. There's
a real element of self preservation at work too. Exactly exactly, it's it's the entire construct which requires these companies to produce higher earnings and returns for shareholders, no matter what the circumstances are. So one of the really compelling quotes there was. There were a lot of them, but in your story, it was the CFO saying all the way back in two thousand not to get overly focused on
the box. And what she meant is that the plane itself was obviously important, but customers knew that, and so it was time to focus on other things. Did that strike you at the time or is it one of those quotes that in retrospect you say, oh my god, that was a moment. It struck me at the time. I remember thinking that the customer focus should always be emphasized as number one, and safety should always be emphasized
as number one in that type of business. And the message that the CFO at the time was trying to push was that it was a message to shareholders. It was that Boeing understands the need for profitability, and so that's where that quote was coming from. But at the time I thought it could lead to problems pushed to its farthest limits, and you were hearing that rumbling all the way back then, which the quote is. The quote is part of right. The engineers reacted strongly to that, exactly.
Part of the audience was also the engineers who were pushing back on the shareholder focus. So this is there's the Man thirty seven, and then there's the Dreamliner. There's also this problem too. The New York Times wrote apiece, and I guess it is the factory that makes the Dreamliner that this plant was supposed to be trumpeted as the state of the art manufacturing hub and that too has been plagued by shoddy production. Is that a part of this story is as well, that it isn't just
the Max. It isn't just the seven thirty seven Max. The problems are much deeper. Yeah, and that I think the way to understand the problems at the plant in South Carolina that produces the Dreamliner is that that plant was established because Boeing was trying to control its unions.
Boeing had felt that the unions had the upper hand because the especially the Machinist Union, could always shut down production if they struck, which meant that the plant and evert which produced s wide bodies couldn't produce and so
Bowing had to capitulate. So Boing, as part of a strategy to increase its leverage against the Machinist Union, opened this new plant in South Carolina, which analysts at the time were surprised by because they felt it would be difficult to replicate the aerospace workforce, the supply base that Boeing had in Washington. So, and that's exactly what's happened. There have been numerous documented problems with faulty parts and
ending up on airplanes and quality inspections not catching. I thought this quote in your story that McNerney jokes on this conference call with journalists when he's getting ready to retire, and he joked, the heart will still be beating, the
employees will still be cowering. Yeah, And that was a striking quote at the time because it was in the middle of all this conflict with unions and so, you know, the engineers I spoke was said that at the time they actually some people had signs on their desks showing a kind of a cowering middle manager and it said if I'm not here, I'm probably cowering. That's that's not encouraging, is it. No, And that's just part of the back door. I mean, the people that I talked to, you know,
described a really chilling, you know environment. It was the kind of environment where layoffs were happening, at first voluntary and then involuntary, and so people didn't feel that they
could speak up. And when I heard that from multiple people, it began to make more sense how a problem like the one on the MAX could have developed, which seems to have been largely because of miscommunications and just sloppy mistakes, such as an alert that might have alerted the pilots to the fact that one of the angle of attack sensors was not working, that was just not hooked up properly, which which Boeing discovered a year before the first crash.
Explain what that was and how that how that played out, how that's kind of miscommunication can become something that takes people's lives. The real problem, at least as pilots describe it, is that they did not even know that this automated software system was on the airplane, that this maneuvering characteristics augmentation system which automatically began pushing the nose of the plane down when one sensor detected that the nose was
going up too high. Unfortunately, it turned out that this sensor was faulty and the nose should not have been pushed down, And when the pilots tried to countermand that order, the software kept pushing the nose down, which was not what the FAA had had certified and it was not the intention of the software engineers at Bowing, and Bowing has since announced a fix which would take information from both sensors and would reduce the ability of the software
to continue pushing the nose down, even when the pilots try to countermand it. And it's really unusual after an accident to have such clear evidence of what happened. In many cases, accident investigations don't reach a firm conclusion for years. But in this case, we had two accidents within five months where investigators very quickly determined a critical error in the software. It was crystal clear what the cause was. But how does that happen. I'm still unclear as to
how that could happen. How somebody couldn't have said we've got a problem here, especially since they knew it before the crash has happened. You're hitting on what investigators are still trying to determine who knew what when, and so far it seems that the errors were there were honest mistakes made, or at least that's what people have talked
to assume, you know, barring other evidence. But it may come back to the fact that this was a compartmentalized design system where one hand didn't know what the other was doing. In other words, a mistake of this magnitude could happen through sheer sloppiness, not through deliberate wrongdoing or
deliberate obfuscation exactly. There's this lawsuit that was recently filed, and there's an exchange in the lawsuit where a pilot is heard saying, in this conversation, we flat out deserve to know what is on our airplanes, and this unidentified Boeing official answers, I don't disagree, and then a pilot says, these guys didn't even know the damn system was on the airplane, referring to the Lion air pilots in their crash, nor did anybody else, And the Boeing official says, I
don't know that understanding this system would have changed the outcome of this. In a million miles, you're going to maybe fly this airplane and maybe once you're going to see this. Ever, so I wondered if from that there was this sense that, well, this was just a minor issue and something we could afford to overlook, rather than something that was going to blow up into this reputation
destroying thing. Yeah. I think that quote was given to the American Airlines pilots in November after the first crash of the Lion airplane, and he was saying, you won't see this again in a million miles. Well, it happened within one hundred thousand flights of the plan within five months,
so that conclusion seems wrong. Yeah, it's a really interesting story about odds, right, that you can try to calculate the odds of something going wrong and say they're minimal, but that can actually be an incredibly misleading way to think about things right. One of the heroes of the Boeing engineering workforce is a manager named at Well Al
Molalley went on to run Forward. He designed the Triple seven and had a quote that he would often use, which is that the problem with communication is the illusion that it happened. So he would try to manage his meetings and airplanes with really overcommunicating and trying to make
sure that all sides understood what was happening. And it seems that Boeing went away from that, and that's another reason I led the story with that first anecdote, which shows that Boeing was trying to limit what people knew and according to when the engineer involved, this was just to save money that it would have been costly for airlines and if they had been given all the information and if there was a new software system that was introduced on the plane, and that that may have triggered
this additional training, and that's just that better communication would just be more costly, so therefore keep everything siloed. Exactly after all these years of covering business, does your gut tell you that this is a case of sloppiness and miscommunication rather than something I don't even even know if it's arguably darker, because sometimes sometimes incompetence is actually more
frightening than malevolence, right, yeah. One of my editors described this early on as Boeing's Challenger moment, and that's you know, the famous case where it ended up being this one faulty o'erring seal that brought down the Challenger and it shouldn't have flown, and engineers were warning the day before that the seal couldn't stand up to the cold on the day that the shuttle flew, and you know, some of those engineers who tried to stop the Challenger from flying,
you know, we're tormented by it for years. You know, would talk thirty years later about how they wish they could have changed their manager's minds about that. And that's why I'm really interested to see what the investigators turn up, because that will turn up who said what when you know there may be a challenger moment that we don't
know about. Did you hear some of that? And you're reporting some feeling of maybe if I had been louder, I could I could have done this, even from people who weren't necessarily central to that issue, but from the people who were warning that something was going wrong with the culture for years. I didn't hear that exact tone of contrition. It was more just how could this happen? You know, to you know Boeing, you know, this vaunted
engineering company, renowned for meticulous engineering. How could it happen? And it was it was more just wanting to know the answers. And there was another scene that we described for the end of the story where Dennis Muhlenberg came to meet with the engineers in Seattle, and it was an emotional meeting. It was introduced by the head of the commercial airplanes business, and at least one person was weeping.
And then Muhlenberg got up and answered five questions or so with these artfully vague responses that people have gotten used to. And this engineer told someone it was a nothing burger. So they I think that people even within Boeing want to know how it happens. So there's this Forbes headline that asks, really bluntly, can Bowing be safe and profitable? And it was a consultant who used software to search through Boeing's reports and Airbuses reports to see
how many times each one used the words safe. And it turns out Boeing only had seventeen words related to safe, and it's one hundred and fifty four page annual report, and Airbuses three hundred and twenty four page annual report. It has one hundred and fifty five words related to safe, which would ratio wise suggest airs is thinking a little bit more about safety and Bowing used two profit words for every safety word, while Airbus's ratios one profit word
for every safety word. Do you think language matters? And do you think safety and profitability are diametrically opposed or should they go together? I don't see how safety and profitability are diametrically opposed, because if you produce the safest airplane ever, that's the one people are going to want to fly on, you would hope. So, right back to something you'd said earlier, why do you think it is that Boeing stock is holding up as well as it has.
I mean, it's it's way off its peak, but yet it still is up this year despite these two horrific accidents in the first two groundings of planes by the FA since nineteen seventy nine. How does that square It's because it's ultimately a duopoly and the only option that customers have is to go to Airbus, which has completely
full assembly lines for several years. So unless further evidence emerges, or unless there's another crashs are sticking with Boeing, sensing that it's going to find a way to tough this out. And do you think that's true? Do you think Boeing will find a way to tough it out. I think it's a hundred year old plus company that has incredible brands and engineering knowledge still behind it. So it may, but there may be more surprises and bruises along the way.
The duopoly structure is really interesting in the protection that that affords a company, even as in as precariously seeming a place as Boeing. Is right, and is it just that there's literally nobody else other than Boeing and Airbus, and this business is so complicated and so has so much history to it that you can't have a new competitor step up and take one of their places. Yeah, that is That is the case, and that's probably the
case for ten years or more. You know. Most of the analysts I talked to are just very skeptical about new competitors, including China, which has developed a plane of roughly similar size to the seven thirty seven eight through twenty, but it's not considered a viable contender at least for
a decade. But the interesting thing for Boeing is whether customers in Asia stick with it, because Asia is so much of the market now and Lion Air and Indonesia is so upset at Boeing for its handling of the crash and really in blaming the airline's maintenance at first. So oh did they do that? They blame the maintenance at first. They pointed very pointedly at several cases where maintenance steps weren't followed, and Lion Air had not had
a spotless maintenance record. So after the first crash, there wasn't the scrutiny you saw after the second one, because this narrative that maintenance may have been partly to blame, or even more to blame. What's holding Wow, interesting act of corporate ducking of responsibility? Right to put it kindly, you could put it. So, why are people skeptical about the Chinese plane and about the market share that might garner, Because you know, as you were saying, it is such
a complex product. It's it's millions of parts, it's the most rigorous safety standards of any product in the world, and it's a product that involves hundreds of suppliers. They've everything's got to come together exactly right. And in addition to that, you know, even if you do make this plane perfectly, people are going to be reluctant to fly a brand new plane before there's a track record, and
Boeing and Airbus have track records stretching back decades. And for all of Boeing's problems, China doesn't exactly have a great reputation for manufacturing precision either, right, No, no, exactly. You also write about Boeing's relationship with its regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration. I've long been fascinated by companies and their regulators, and there's some maybe not unique things about about that dynamic. But what surprise, do you the most?
And looking into Boeing's relationship with the FA. This all happened after I was covering Bowing directly as a beat and so I was surprised to see how much the regulatory system had had changed. And it's a system called organization designation authorization. In this system, it used to be that the FAA would would have sort of direct managerial authority over the engineering workforce at Boeing that are responsible
for the safety sign offs. But back in two thousand and nine, under initiative that started in the George W. Bush administration, the FAA began shifting that authority to the manufacturer. And people I talked with said that they noticed the change that that once Boeing had more authority over the regulatory process, they started putting more junior engineers, you know, people that may have been more easily controllable, into these positions.
Self regulation is something that happens in many industries. It's relatively new in aerospace, at least in terms of this system. I should say that self regulation has happened since the FAA was born in nineteen sixty. The engineers have always had authority to certify the products but there was much closer supervision before this new system came into ploy. What brought about this new system, this shift in two thousand
and nine. Is that a story of cost as well? Yeah, that's a story of lobbying, and that's lobbying by the aerospace industry but which felt that this system was slow. They wanted to have the control to keep projects moving along as quickly as they felt was warranted, and it took longer when the FAA was involved in directly nominating
an approving individual engineers in the process. I thought there was a stunning statistic in your story that the fa says it would need ten thousand more employees and an additional one point eight billion of taxpayer money each year to bring certification entirely in house. Those are stunning numbers, don't you think. Yeah, yeah, it's something that Congress has gone along with because government is expensive. From where we sit today, where would you say Boeing is going to
be in five years? Is this going to leave lasting scars or given this duopoly position, are they going to be able to effect waltz away from this? They may be a more clear number two to Airbus in five years, because even if they are getting some orders for the seven thirty seven Max. Three twenty seems to have an advantage in the narrow body planes that are a majority
of the market. And I think the surveys are showing that a solid number up to half of flyers are saying they don't want to fly on the Max for a year. So there may be a sales overhang that Boeing finds hard to overcome. They may find it harder to make the profits they've been banking. Would you get on a seven thirty seven Max. I would after the FAA certifies it and once international regulators certified, So you need both, not just the fa You want international regulators
to look at it too. And do you hear anything from inside Boeing that the engineers think, well, maybe now we'll start being listened to. Do you think it will result in a cultural shift of any of any type inside Boeing? It really depends on how reflective the company is. I hear from some people who think there may be
a shift. One encouraging thing is that before these crashes, Dennis Muhlenberg was looking to bring more work in house, so the avionics sort of cockpit electronics work would have come back in house, and maybe if we were in house, you wouldn't have these problems. That that was partly profit driven as well, because Boeing has been a little resentful of what it feels are higher profits that some of
the suppliers are getting. But it's a someone encouraging sign that Muhlenberg is an engineer, So you hope that he would, even if he's not saying it publicly, would have some grasp of what the issues are. So I'm going to be uncharacteristically happy and say that just maybe maybe there'll be a silver lining to all of this terrible tragedy. I hope so. On that note, I hope so too, And thank you so much for taking the time to
chat with me. Thank you it was a pleasure. Before talking to Peter, I saw the Boeing story as a terrible tragedy for the passengers and crew who were killed and for their families. Now I see it also as a tragic tale of a company that lost its way and lost its soul and as a result, had what Peter calls a challenger moment. Was it, like the Challenger a result of sloppiness, bad communication, and in this case too much focus on reducing costs or will it turn
out to be something darker and more deliberate? Stay tuned. What we know for sure is the truth of that famous Warren Buffett quote it takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. I bet Boeing wishes it could have done things differently. Making a Killing is the co production of Pushkin Industries and Chalk and Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Rosie Stoffer. My executive
producers are Alison mcclein. No relation in Making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason Gambrell and Jason Rostkowski. Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany mcclin. Thank you so much for listening. You can find me on Twitter at Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've most enjoyed.