weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday, american history tv documents america's story. and on sundays, booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these companies and more, including sparklight. he has served as a bureau chief and a speech writer for

bloom berg businessweek. he has won four best awards for business editing and writing. a native of st. paul, minnesota, with an honors degree in stanford, he lives in seattle with his wife and two children. they're here tonight to discuss peter's book, "flying blind: the 1936 tragedy in the fall of boeing." please help me welcome dominic

gates and peter robinson. good morning, i'm dominic gates. before i start throwing questions at him, let me talk about the book. since the subtitle of the book includes the fall of boeing, i'd like to begin by recalling the great legacy of boeing and what it means to this region and to the world. boeing gives the puget sound region a part of its social fabric. all those blue-collar jobs, highly paid, advanced engineering work that was world class and was all here for 100 years and generations of families have grown up with boeing. and it's created the economy of the pacific northwest. and, of course, it gave the world an iconic line of

jetliners, like the 747 that have just shrunk the world -- shocked the world incredibly in my lifetime. this is a company that has given the world a great deal. now, the fall from public favor recently obviously began with the two crashes of the max in 2018 and 2019. and since then, it seems like nothing has gone right for boeing. everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, and right now they're back in the air, but obviously the pandemic at the airline industry and boeing. but they've got all sorts of manufacturing problems. they've delivered 14 787s per

year. they were supposed to deliver 18. what this book sets out to answer that peter wrote, how did a company that prided himself on its engineering prowess that had perfectionism in its dna go so widely off course? that's the question he sets out to answer, and i have to say this is a great book. i think it will become the go-to book for boeing. i'd like to just mention three things i find very impressive about it. first of all, he really nailed the cultural shift that has happened in boeing over the last two decades, and if you've ever talked to boeing people, i'm sure there are some here, you've often heard, oh, the merger with mcdonald-douglas ruined

everything, ruined the culture. that's perhaps too easy a conclusion, but he, with deep research and lots of exclusive interviews maps out this cultural shift incredibly well. it's really worth reading for that to get a perspective on how he got here. the other thing is, he's a wonderful writer. there are so many arresting sentences in the book. i'm just going to read one of them. it refers to the airworthiness directives the faa issued one week after the liner crash. i remember reading that so well, because you know when a planned crash is very far away? unfortunately it often doesn't get a lot of attention here in the united states. bad weather, poor airline, old airplane, something like that is the usual picture. this was odd, this was a new plane and the weather was perfect. but still, what happened, nobody

really knew, but a week later boeing issued a bulletin and the faa followed with a narrative directive. i remember reading it and said oh, there is a system if the sensor goes wrong and tells pilots what to do if that happened. for me, and i'm sure every other airworthiness reporter afterward, boeing is telling us there is something wrong with the plane. the wording of it -- here's what peter wrote. the faa organization directive was so punitive on its face, like a bug alert but so paradoxically earth-shattering. i feel it was. i feel like from that moment on, i, as an air space reporter, knew this was going to be a big investigation. we have to find out what happened here. finally, before i go to

questions, i will say that the other thing i really admire about the book is how he's unflinching in his conclusions. he really, very succinctly, he documents it all, it's footnoted, but succinctly says what he needs. those who remember boeing will remember the ceo of ten years and really solidied the culture. before he came to boeing, he was very famous for lots of inventions, including the post-it note. so peter writes this: in just over four years, mcnerny doubled the profits. he slashed jobs, he slashed r&d

spending, and that's how he got his profits, but he destroyed the future of the company. so, terrific story, terrific history, great writing. that's the book. now i'm going to give peter his chance to talk about it with a few questions and later on we'll come to your questions. peter, it seems to me a company can't move past a great tragedy like this one that killed 346 people without first admitting what it did wrong. do you think boeing has done so? >> thank you. i want to stop and just thank you for that introduction and its high praise coming from you. everyone in the room, i think, knows the esteem dominic has held in the aerospace industry and his coverage over the last two decades, really, and i will try to say what i mean as i did

in the book today. so the question is, has boeing ever really admitted fault? i think it depends on the audience. they just this month, as you reported, they admitted fault in a court filing, said that their unsafe design was the proximate cause of the crash. in other audiences, they've had a very hard time admitting fault. you saw after the first crash that it was the pilots who didn't follow the checklist, it was maintenance mistakes. you saw later after the second crash saying there was no technical slip or gap. eventually there was a mealy-mouthed, we own it. finally there was an "i'm sorry" in public. even at recently as last year, dave calhoun, the current ceo, was suggesting that it was something that american pilots

could have handled. so i think it's an open question as to whether boeing has ever really truly accepted fault. >> i think publicly boeing has said the design of the system, this software that went wrong, that they failed to take into account the reactions of the pilots. they've said that. which to me is also pointing part of the blame at the pilots. but one thing that i wondered about often, and i think in the book you talk about previous generation of boeing airplanes where somebody stands up, an engineer or a pilot, stands up in the room when they're doing the design and somebody has made a suggestion, and this guy stands up and says, do you want blood on the seats? and nobody did that. when mcas was being designed -- we know all about the pilot who pulled the wool over the faa and deceived the airlines and didn't

let them know that mcas existed. but what about the actual design of mcas? how did that get past this tremendous engineering company where you get all the engineers in a room and you get these pilots who are there to stand in for airline pilots, and at some point somebody didn't say a single thread, a single censor tips off the system? i don't think boeing has ever addressed that. >> i think it's a reflection of the way the checks and balances were broken down, that there is an example said in the book on the 737 next generation where someone realized there would be a single point failure introduced in a fuel tank design, and he stood up in the meeting and said, how much blood do you want on the seat covers, and that got people's attention. over time, partly because of this cost cutting you mentioned

that started in ernest during the mcinerny years, more people were being laid off, and you had less clout to make the blood on the seat covers decdeclaration. i people i talked to on the max said they felt those checks and balances were broken down when they tried to raise concerns or tried to say more sophisticated flight controls should be introduced, they were summarily shot down. >> i mentioned this pilot who is the only one who has not been criminally indicted. that's mark faulkner, who was the chief technical pilot on the max. he was indicted -- his actions are clearly inexcusable. he convinced the faa not to put this system in the manuals. he convinced airlines not to have simulator training when they asked for it, including the

airliner. my question is, he's one guy. is he a scapegoat? where else does responsibility lie, do you think? >> it clearly lies with management, and the evidence shows he is a scapegoat, as critical as those comments might be. there is a story i tell in the book, a series of events, and in october of 2019 after the second crash, dennis mullenberg was going to be hauled in in front of congress. he would be the public face of this deadly blunder, and it was a bit before that, in that month, that a staffer on the house transportation and infrastructure committee, which had been getting regular releases of documents from boeing, got a release, and the call from boeing was, take a look at the one on the top. and the one on the top was the messages which became infamous where mark forkner, this pilot,

already had known about the potential problems with the software before the plane was delivered. during those hearings, dennis mullenberg showed some distance from mr. forkner. he was asked about these messages. ted cruz sort of confronted, if you remember the scene where ted cruz is confronting dennis mullenberg over these messages, and dennis mullenberg said, we're not quite -- at this point forkner had left the company, and he said, we're not quite sure what mr. forkner meant. we think he was talking about a simulator in development. and he had every reason to know exactly what mr. forkner meant, because mr. forkner's lawyer was paid by boeing through boeing's own director and officer liability insurance. so it was a bit of a double game where boeing was holding him out as a scapegoat, as you're saying. >> and his deputy, patrick

gulstafson, was at boeing at the time. that was the other guy at the end of the messages. >> cruz asked him at the time, did you ask him, and dennis mullenberg had to say no. >> besides boeing, your book documents a parallel decline within the faa in terms of the oversight that they were -- that was their job. what went wrong within the faa, do you think? >> well, i tell that story through the perspective of the faa specialist on the ground, and they had -- they're people who talked about their managers as being people who were just as technically skilled as them going back to the '80s and the early '90s. people had great feelings about working on the 777 which many people considered the last great airplane at boeing. then things started shifting, and this goes back to the reagan revolution and the idea that

government is the problem, not the solution. agencies are starved for resources that play out in different ways and different agencies, but at the faa, it was with an embrace of this extreme delegation of authority. so i interviewed lots and lots of engineers who felt that their managers were no longer working to hold boeing accountable and produce the safest design. they were seeing their customer, ultimately, as being the manufacturer and that the goal was to help the manufacturer speed the product to the market. >> right, and then you quote richard reed, who is an faa safety engineer at the time. do you remember what he said? >> yeah. he had kind of a remarkable analogy. he said at the time he was seeing what was happening and he was seeing that his authority was diminishing. he saw it as congress, which had

intentionally dumbed down the agency, and he thought of himself as like forrest gump, and he imagined what he would say if anyone hauled him in front of congress and said, why did you certify this plane so quickly, and he thought just like forrest gump put his rifle together so fast, because you told me to, congressman. >> congress did an about-turn afterwards and held these hearings, which are actually really good, but you're right, before the crashes, all the direction of congress was to push the faa into treating boeing as a customer. >> those were the words. instead of applicant for several years, customer was the preferred language for the

applicant. >> and steve dixon is a former boeing pilot. he has appeared at several of these hearings since then. he was appointed after the second crash but he has been pioneered by boeing since the crash. what do you think of him since the crashes? >> he's a former airline executive. as you say, he's trying to balance these competing demands right now, trying to show that he's heeded the message that the agency is reforming itself. at the same time, just this year, michael stumo, the father of one of the victims on the ethiopian crash, got a note from an engineer at the faa who said that recently managers have been saying, you know, that they can expect not much to change as a result of those rules and that one of these managers called it,

quote, posing for the cameras. >> i've heard some of that, too. i've also been impressed somewhat with some of the changes we see publicly. you know, just before the first crash, our local senator maria cantwell actually helped write some clauses in the faa reauthorization bill a month before the crash, increasing the amount of delegation that would be done to boeing. but cantwell then reversed completely after the crashes, and so last december she helped pass this reform act. and then since then, the faa does seem to be getting tougher. they've delayed certification of the 777x quite a lot. it's going to take four years. it took one year from first light to certification of the 777, one month.

now it will take four months for the new certification. i've heard stories of how they've tightened up a little bit, but i wonder, have they gone far enough with the faa? is it really going to change? >> i think time will tell. i think it will depend on whether the cultural shift truly takes hold. i think you reported recently that the faa was concerned about the experience level of the people that boeing was appointing as deputies who were meant to represent the faa. there is a brain drain that's taken place over a generation, really, that has to be addressed on both sides. >> right. well, let's step back from the max for just a moment and go back to that cultural shif i talked about at the beginning. lots of people, as i said, blame the mcdonald-douglas merger

which was in 1997 which began the change for boeing. but that was phil condit who moved the headquarters from chicago to here. you write, phil condit was emboldened by the chieftains he admired. condit was the top engineer in the 777, which was the last great airplane that boeing built. what happened to condit after he became ceo? >> he was a great engineer, according to the people i talked to. he would have been a great college professor. he was -- he was -- this constituency of shareholders was very powerful, and that became the group that he judged his own

performance on. and if you remember, at the time, that was the days of jack welch of general electric, which was the ultimate model for any manufacturer in the u.s., and for a company like boeing, that meant services, that meant financial engineering, that meant finance. so phil condit pursued the merger with mcdonald-douglas, he pursued acquisitions. the commercial airplane company was seen as a commodity business that could take care of itself. he would move to chicago and focus on the big strategic picture. >> actually, i interviewed condit -- before i worked for the "seattle times," i interviewed condit in st. louis in the beginning of 2001, just before they announced the headquarters move. in that interview he talked about wanting to shift the idea

of what boeing was, that we weren't metal benders anymore. of course, all the planes were metal at the time, but he was talking about new internet connections to airplanes, beaming movies to cinemas via satellite. he wanted boeing to be high tech and plan making was metal bending. really strange. but you mentioned general electric. the influence of ge on boeing has been incredible. i mean, after condit we got stone cipher who came with mcdonald-douglas, and he was turned on, and there was a description in the book, i'll

just read it. ge was an american institution. it had pioneered inventions that dramatically improved living standards. the light bulb, the diesel machine, the diesel electric locomotive, the refrigerator. the people who worked in its factories and labs in river times and industrial birds around the country thought of themselves as family. welch was telling investors he wouldn't flinch from the hard decisions to jettison them, whatever the political cost. in fact, when he took over he got rid of a lot of the staff and got the nickname neutral jack. but this is corporate america being lionized on the cover of "fortune" magazine, and jack welch was at the top of the pile. can you talk a little bit how ge

had such influence over corporate america generally and boeing specifically? >> yeah. i mean, at the time he was considered, he was the model of what a ceo should look like and what he should prioritize. and phil condit knew him, had a personal relationship with him. stone cipher, as you say, had worked for him, was a protege of jack welch's. it was fix it and sell it. financial engineering, during those years, ge met or beat earnings expectations from '95 to 2004, which you can do if you have a finance unit where you can sell something at the end of one quarter, then buy it back the next quarter, and later the

sec found that ge had bent the county rules beyond the breaking point, was the wording. so jack welch had this influence throughout boeing, and as you say, it continues to this day. dave calhoun is -- jack welch's former speechwriter said he is the guy most like jack in his book. >> we'll get back very specifically to boeing in a moment, but one last thing. you actually broaden at the context of what has happened. even broader, you cite the influence of milton friedman in 1970 in reagan's america who wrote in 1970 that a company's sole responsibility is to increase its profits. then you had this rather arresting sentence. two generations later in any prosperous american city, the

unequal effects are plain. tesla's luxury highrises, avocado toast and tents. sounds like seattle. now, if there is some marxist academic writing that, it would be less startling, but it's coming from a business reporter. so it's kind of a stunning judgment on the business world. do you think corporate america has lost its way? >> i am a business reporter. it's a big question for a business reporter, but i'm a business reporter who has seen the story over time, and i've seen how it ends. when i moved to seattle in 1998, and i was eager to meet these great engineers that boeing was lionized in books like "built to last" and "in search of excellence," but that was also this period of shareholder

primacy declared that the duty to any company is to shareholders. as long as you take care of profits, employees, communities, the customers, they can take care of themselves. and phil condit was a chairman of the business roundtable. and more recently, you're seeing that shift. the business roundtable is recognizing that companies have duties to all stakeholders. >> yeah. i think one of the saddest things is that one stakeholder group that really lost out at boeing is the employees. mcnerny and the other ceos were so anti-union and just had this mentality that they could get cheaper labor somewhere else. so all the talent here, all this generations of skills in some ways was thrown away, and the

people who feel like that means they lost some pride in the company. let's get back to the specifics of boeing. i've often heard people say, oh, boeing should be run by an engineer. you know, the current ceo is not an engineer. but dennis mullenberg was an engineer, as was phil condit, as we said earlier. dennis mullenberg was an engineer. when he came in following mcnerny, i remember being full of hope, oh, it's an engineer taking over. one of the first things he did was sign a new contract with spira, the engineering union. they came up with a great deal, and i thought, wow, that's a good sign. but otherwise he kept strictly to the mcnerny way. mcnerny had taken him for 18 months to chicago to be groomed for the role, and i don't think

he strayed at all from sort of the financial focus that mcnerny had taught him. so mullenberg has come off very badly in the max saga. why do you think he failed? since he was this energetic engineering guy, why did he fail so badly? >> you would think being an engineer, that engineering would have primacy in the company, and everything i've been told is dennis mullenberg is a great program manager, he's detail oriented, he's driven, he rides his bicycle 140 miles a week. but it could be that the skills you need in a crisis like the max are not those of engineering, he needs someone with broad judgment about what to do after something like that. in a lot of ways people describe bill allen, who was a lawyer, as

being the best ceo in boeing's history, and he was someone who wrote notes to himself like, don't talk too much, let others talk, be considerate of -- make a sincere effort to understand labor's viewpoint. that hasn't been happening at boeing. there is a story i tell in the book about a crash that took place in a 747 in 1985 in japan, and it crashed into the side of the mountain, the vertical fin had ruptured, and within a month boeing came out and said, it was our fault, that there had been a bad repair job at a boeing facility, and it took japanese authorities by complete surprise. and i've talked to people who, after the lion air crash, thought if boeing just made a similar mea culpa, and even

though it's hard to admit fault, it could have defused everything that happened afterwards. >> i should say the great aftermath of this book is how peter paints pictures of the personalities. he goes into depth of what mullenberg is like as a person, his bike riding and his intense focus. it's all there in the book. the same for the other leaders. let me ask you about another one, which is alan mulally. many boeing engineers have said to me, if only alan had stayed. if he had been made ceo, then the company would have been saved. but alan mulally was in charge of the 787 debacle. he left just before it all fell apart. and you write about how you had become disengaged in the months, maybe half year before he left. and by the way, there is also

news in the book that you will not have read anywhere else. you also reveal a more sordid reason why mulally was not elevated to the ceo. tell us about mulally. >> as you say, he's a revered figure at boeing. he is the person that brought the 777 home to great success. he really popularized the phrase "working together" at boeing, and this idea that you really need to overcommunicate. he had a phrase that the problem with communication is the illusion that it happened. so he brought people together, he was considered technically brilliant. if you remember, he was ever smiling, boyish, had a perpetually upbeat personality, but that demeanor, according to people i talked to for the book,

was also held against him in some ways, because when it became his turn to be considered for the ceo role against jim mcnerny who was not a board member, mcnerny was seen as more the ceo type. that board source that i talked to said that there was just some people who look like an nfl quarterback, and in the same way mcnerny looks like a ceo. to them he would pursue a more shareholder-friendly, predictable strategy. and alan was seen as excitable, we're going to build that plane. there was another risk fctor that came up, which i get into in the book, which is about his personal life. there had been two consecutive ceos who resigned because of inappropriate relationships with subordinates, so one of them i talked to said the board couldn't afford to take the

risk. >> for details, you can see the book. at this point let me ask, some of your sources, as in many of my stories, have to be anonymous because boeing employees cannot talk to me or you, probably, without a pr person beside them or they lose their jobs. can you talk about your sources ask why some of them are anonymous, and how you came to trust them? >> i trust them because they had direct knowledge of the events, and just as in a newspaper or any other article, there are situations where people can't be named because it might affect their career, their livelihood, but they have important information. >> you did an incredible amount of research, a lot of reading, a lot of -- i think possibly you

traveled. did you travel to mullenberg's hometown in iowa? >> this was during the pandemic, so i traveled to the kitchen to make a sandwich. no, i really relied on the reporting i had done over the 25 years and having visited boeing facilities and having been to air shows and conferences and meeting airlines and customers over that time. i did zoom interviews with the people overseas. >> it's marvelously documented, all the various points that he makes. we're running out of time, so let me just ask a couple quick questions. as i mentioned, boeing right now certainly is at a low point in its history. it almost seems like it needs churchilian leadership to get out of this and to recover. the leaders right now are dave calhoun, the ceo in chicago, and the local commercial airplanes chief, stan deal.

are these the right leaders, and what do you think is needed to save boeing? >> i spent a lot of time reading about boeing over the last two years, really over the last 25 years, as i said, and the theme that struck me is investing in the product, bill boeing said, let no improvement in flying pass us by, and it ultimately succeeds that planes like the 747, the 737 were not seen as sure bets at the time. but when investments were made, ultimately there was a payoff. i don't know if that's something dave calhoun is attuned to with his history. he has a history in private equity, he has a history of parachuting into different divisions at ge. >> of course, it's a really difficult position for anybody who might be leading boeing now, but they're overwhelmed with

debt, and they probably should launch a new air plan, but it's a bad time to do so and they don't have the money. i'm going to ask two very quick questions, then we'll go to questions from the audience. the max is back in service. is it fixed? would you put your kids on board? >> the mcas software has been addressed, the particular fault with the mcas software. there was other things the faa wanted. she wanted shielding around the cables, they wanted an iconic system that was kind of a checklist. those have not been put on the plane. i think the statistic i saw last year was one in every 3.7 million flights had a fatal crash, and the max has had 200,000, or more than 200,000 at this point.

so i'm going to wait for more evidence for me, for my kids. >> you're not going to fly on it? >> i don't have to fly anywhere now. >> okay. well, one last question, we talked about ge, and you've all probably heard the news recently that basically the house that jack built has collapsed. the whole edifice of ge, they're breaking up. other companies, because of that, are thinking along the same lines. toshiba in japan is doing the same. do you think it's possible, and would it be a good idea, for boeing to break up into its commercial and defense units again under the merger and perhaps moved back the headquarters to seattle? >> it seems really appealing because it would turn back the clock. pre-'97, boeing was at a high point, had two-thirds of the

market. the thing about being a combined commercial and military company is that you get so much synergy. i think a breakup of boeing could also potentially have other effects. you might be tempted to take the stable military and government contracts, put those in to cleanco and put the pension obligations into the riskier airplane business. ideally for boeing, it would come out of this and be a combined, stable company. >> it's certainly the idea that i've heard, including from some senior boeing executives in the past, not current ones. okay, it's time for audience questions, and i've got a little ipad here to go through, so let me see what we can do.

which of boeing's ceos should take the most blame for the 737 max crashes? >> dennis mullenberg was the one who was at the helm. at the very end of development, and he had the opportunity to dig into the ground truth of what happened after the first crash. >> okay. does boeing have something to learn from airbus at this point, given the problems with the max and the new dreamliner manufacturing issues? >> airbus has had -- their chief pilot has always had a lot of clout within the organization. i think boeing does have some things to learn from airbus.

one thing that i learned in reporting the book, there is a stereotype of europe with its strict labor regulations is at a disadvantage to boeing. that became an advantage in some ways to boeing because it had to train its work force, it had to rely on a highly skilled work force. so that's one difference. >> i guess this is also an airbus-related question. what role did the competitive landscape play in the failures that led to the engineering problems with the max? i think boeing has said that the reason for cost cutting was because of the specter of airbus. >> there was -- there were many opportunities during the pasts 20, 30 years where boeing faced

this choice. airbus had come out with a plane that was about 20 years newer. the airbus had a plane that had fly-by-wire technology. boeing didn't. there was a meeting i wrote about in 1992 that gordon bethune became ceo of continental where executives in the airplane business went around the room and said, should we develop a brand new 737? and he got a kick under the table from someone who wanted to vote the other way. he said the next gen is the way to go, and the vote was 5-3. there are points in boeing's history where it could have taken the step to invest, but it was always the more expedient one to not because of the wide base the 737 had and the fact the tooling was already paid

off, the factory was already paid off. >> of course, then, historically boeing made the big bad with the 737 and i guess for the 777 as well. when it came time for the 787, cost cutting was already there in chicago, so they came up with this global ad sourcing so boeing wouldn't have to pay for a lot of it, which was a financial disaster. what are the main lessons of the max tragedy? >> the main lesson as i see it is to listen to what your employees are telling you. managers had a prime directive to minimize training on the max. there were points in boeing's history when there was also a wish to minimize training.

but there was an understanding that if that was permissible by the design, if we could design a way to make that ethically possible, i think that will the dick taillights of management overroad what people on the ground were saying.t of managemt people on the ground were a of management overroad what people on the ground were t of management overroad what people on the ground were e of management overroad what people on the ground were s of management overroad what people on the ground were saying. >> the next question is about the faa. the detail guy was ali barami and he left to work for the information association and then he became director for the faa. he was the faa's top executive in charge of airplane safety. how would you describe ali burami? >> he was described as someone

that developed the revolving door at work. he saw boeing as his customer, and he would tell specialists in the office, you know, leave it to boeing, they know what to do, they know the processes. he went to the industry lobbying group and made a $300,000 a year salary and came back to the faa, and allowed the max to keep flying after the first crash. >> yeah, it seems like these ideas take hold in an organization. now, whether it's a ceo or somebody like ali burami in a public agency, the ceo rises to the top. he was an engineer but suddenly he's a ceo and he has to have this group thing that corporate america tells him what to do, which is to cut costs and squeeze suppliers and get rid of unions. suddenly that's what you have to do. then ali burami, this whole

management level at the faa, seemed to think that their job was to help boeing compete against airbus and to champion american industry, in other words, by certifying more quickly and giving boeing the ability to do it itself. you got a lot of group thing there. what does boeing actually need to do to build and sell the aircraft their customers want rather than have them buy airbus? >> well, what boeing did at the time of its great point of the 777 was come up with a gang of 8 customers who told them what they wanted. so listen to customers. >> right. didn't they write down on a napkin or something what we're going to do? we're going to have a plan -- what was it? >> yeah, we're going to have a plane that from the beginning --

we deliver it and everything works, and it was in very plain language on a napkin. >> during the early certification, faa authorities were fond of saying, if i am hauled in front of congress and asked why did you do that, because you told me to, congressman. i guess you addressed that. any further comment on that? >> no, because i've read the book. >> peter, in the excerpt of your book, i guess they mean the piece that was published in "bloomberg businessweek" this week, in the excerpt you released a huge segment focused on explicit racism within the

company. why do you think the previous public investigations of the max failed to bring this culture to light? i'm not sure what that's referring to. maybe the view of the foreign pilots in indonesia and so on? is that what that's getting at? >> i think it's getting at the idea that there was a perhaps unconscious cultural bias that pilots overseas were not as skilled as pilots in the u.s. and i looked -- that's a part of the book that looks at the response after the first crash. paul heroji is a man who lost five family members, his wife, three children and mother-in-law, in the crash in ethiopia, and he said he felt that if the first crash had taken place in the u.s. or the u.k. or canada where lives matter more than other places, his family would not have died,

that, you know, after the first crash they were seen as, quote, mere indonesians. there was a moment in -- there was a meeting that pilots in at. and the american pilots said, this could have happened to us on a flight out of miami, and we would have dropped a plane in biscayne bay and you would have had a real, quote, shit storm, and the american pilots said i think you know what i mean. the boeing executive answered, i do. >> is there a chance the u.s. eventually gets left behind in plane building by europe and then possibly china? >> there is, although it's been such a strong duopoly for so many years. there are many analysts who are skeptical of another airplane builder including china entering the market.

china does have the advantage of having a huge market. the max is not flying in china yet. and it also has the advantage of having loaned a lot of money to a lot of countries that can buy airplanes. so over time, that may change over the next 10 to 20 years. >> mm-hmm. here's a question about the move out of seattle. was moving work -- i guess not just moving the headquarters to chicago, but also moving work out of seattle, because they have done a lot of that, was moving work out of seattle solely about busting the union, do you think? >> it was -- i think the cfo at one point said it was to move to more cost effective areas of the -- to move to more cost effective areas. i think there were moments where moving the flight simulators to miami, to the pilots who

experienced that, that did feel like a move to bust their union because it happened right in the middle of contract talks. >> yeah, and i think the choice of south carolina in 2009 was directly triggered by the machinist strike in 2008. >> right. >> that enraged mcnerney. he wasn't going to put it in washington state after that. though it's pretty extraordinary that after we gave all the tax breaks, we now don't have the 87 built here at all. it's all in south carolina now. do you see any correlations with boeing's issues with military aircraft, either the p-8, which is based on the 737, or the kc-746 tanker? i guess the question must be, any correlations with the max

problems in those airplanes? >> the evidence is showing it is a widespread cultural problem, that the diminishing, the focus on engineering has happened across the company. >> mm-hmm. well, i don't know if i got a clear answer to this earlier, so i'm going to ask it again. do you think boeing can be saved? it's at a low point now. can it recover? can it recover its glory, it can recover equality with airbus? the dubai air show just finished yesterday. and it was a remarkable performance by airbus, full of confidence. and boeing had one max order and that was it and then came home. their executive said very little. so can boeing get out of this?

>> i think with investments, it can. it's at a very low point, especially in the narrow body market where it's basically reversal of where it was 20 years ago. it was two-thirds boeing. now it's two-thirds airbus. and some parts of the market, it's -- with the a-321, it's got a 5-1 gap. so it would take a very focused effort. that's the best way of putting it. >> well, i think people in this region can only hope that that will happen. should boeing rename the max? >> it's the 737-8, right? >> i still call it the max. >> that's a marketing question. >> yeah. boeing isn't officially renaming

it, and i think it would be pretty pointless, but some airlines are leaving the max out, if you climb onboard some of them. i think we're almost out of questions or out of time. let me see, i'll ask one more. muilenburg met with the families. i think this was after the annual general meeting in october of 2019. but he -- where is it, they had no mediator or conflict resolution specialist at the meeting with the families. how do you think boeing handled, i'll just widen the question, how do you think boeing handled treating the families of the victims of those crashes? >> they didn't meet with them for a long time. i know that the family members

felt they should have met with them earlier. what i have been told is that there was -- at that meeting, for instance, one point of concern afterwards was that at least one family member felt dave calhoun in public had exaggerated the amount of time that was spent with the family members. so it's an incredibly difficult situation, but in that situation, they felt it was compounded by the exaggeration of the amount of sensitivity that boeing had shown. there was a memorial held afterwards which boeing arranged. it was held in ethiopia. to some of the family members i talked to, they felt as if it was a commemoration of the bp oil spill staged by bp. there was at one point one of

the top -- there was concern that boeing would be at the service at all, and one of the top boeing executives answered well, if we're paying for it, we'll be there. which again, was felt as insensitive. so those are some of the things i cover in the book. >> yeah, and actually, let me just ask one final question. kind of related to this is how boeing communicated with those families. what do you think of boeing's communication with us now and the world? i mean, the ceo hasn't given interviews publicly except to cnbc or people like jim cramer who are going to say you're wonderful. they don't talk to me, they don't talk to the press. they don't even let me ask questions at the earnings -- at the earnings calls anymore. not just me, no press. no press questions.

it seems like they have really clamped down, and the excuse they have given is oh well, we're waiting until the regulators give the okay to the max, we don't want to get in the way. but everyone has done it now except for the chinese, basically. and i am just kind of mystified by the communication strategy of the company at the moment. >> it's something i have never seen. i think almost unheard of for a company to not give regular press interviews. i think the reason is that they don't want him to put his foot in his mouth. there was -- i'm sure you saw the shareholder suit that the judge in that suit said that dave calhoun had lied in public about the board having met immediately after or soon after the lion air crash, each of his public recompensations was

false, so i think it's shell-shock from the backlash. >> all right, look, i'm going to leave it there. and first of all, peter's book, i think it's available widely at the end of this month, november 30th. but elliot bay book store has it right now and it's out in the hall. the seattle times will run an excerpt in the pacific northwest magazine on sunday, december 12th. but don't let that stop you from buying the book. i highly recommend it. anybody who is interested in boeing should read it. thank you very much for coming. >> thank you. >> here's a look at the best selling nonfiction books according to amazon. topping the list is atomic habits. james clear's advice on breaking bad habits and forming new ones.

after that, graphic novel on the holocaust, maus, which was recently banned from the eighth grade curriculum of a tennessee school district, and hoover institution fellow peter shu wiser reports on the financial relationship between certain wealthy americans and the chinese government in red handed. that's followed by the body keeps the score, a look at how trauma affects our brains and bodies. and wrapping up our look at amazon's best selling nonfiction books is brene brown's atlas of the heart about making meaningful human connections. some of these authors have appeared on book tv and you can watch their programs anytime at booktv.org. >> next on book tv's author interview program, after words, barbara walter examines the warning signs that often precede civil wars. and discusses what can be done to stop them. she's interviewed by smith college middle east studies chair steven