For the vast majority of travelers, stepping foot on an airplane entails a tremendous act of near-blind faith. We control our own cars, trains operate on set tracks at ground level, but flying requires us to put total trust in the expertise of a complete stranger to operate a machine too complex for us to understand. Every time these gargantuan hunks of metal don’t plummet screaming from the sky towards a certain fiery doom, it feels like a miracle, even if that’s how the majority of flights play out. Rory Kennedy’s damning new documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing takes a close look at two incidents included within the small number of flights when things go wrong, and shows us the tragedy that strikes when that sacred compact between passenger and airline is violated.
“I fly a good deal, and the truth is I’ve got a bit of a fear of flying,” Kennedy tells the Guardian from behind the wheel of her car, talking transit in transit. “I like to think that when I walk down that jetway, the manufacturer of that plane is invested in keeping it up in the air, that the regulatory agencies focused on safety are doing in their job, and that at least in our country, the government is making sure the regulatory agencies enforce those safety measures. In this case, it seems that all of those agencies failed us.”
The case she’s referring to is the horrifying account of two crashes related in their shared cause of a faulty part on the Boeing 737 Max model. On 29 October 2018, Indonesia’s Lion Air Flight 610 dove into the Java Sea and left behind 189 casualties; the following year, on 10 March, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 met a similar fate in a similar fashion, with a death toll of 157. After the first catastrophe, one might have expected Boeing to ground their Maxes until they could pinpoint the source of the malfunction. Instead, they shifted culpability to human error on the part of Lion Air, painted by the corporation’s spokespeople as an incompetent third-world operation. Americans certainly had nothing to worry about, they insisted, right up until the Ethiopian Airlines system failure further tarnished their reputation and got people asking whether the Max was really so rock-solid. Boeing was forced to halt the use of the jets, by which point they were already far past too late.
“I followed the story of the two Max crashes, the brand-new 737s that crashed within five months of each other,” Kennedy says. “As one of our characters explains, that just doesn’t happen in modern aviation. It drew a lot of attention, including mine. I was surprised, given how similar the flight patterns were, and how the planes were both the exact same model. There was no weather incident, which caught my eye, as did Boeing’s response. I expected them to be deeply apologetic, to ground the planes immediately and commit to figuring out what’s wrong with them. They took 346 lives. But instead, it seemed like Boeing was focused on blaming the pilots for what happened. I felt like there was a lot more to the story, and wanted to know what happened, with the intention to prevent something like this from happening again.”
The trenchant film (now streaming on Netflix following a well-received debut through Sundance back in January) details her muckraking, which forms the picture of a business willing to gamble with lives for the sake of profit. We learn that Boeing executives knew full well about the risks inherent to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, a small wind gauge that can make the plane’s auto-stabilizers go haywire if damaged. Kennedy delves deep into the mechanical nitty-gritty at play, rendering intricate technical processes palatable for those of us lacking a background in advanced engineering. “I’m not an airplane pilot,” she says. “These terms and concepts were foreign to me, too. I wanted to make them accessible to somebody like me. We worked really hard to fully understand them, and then turn them into information that I hope is digestible to laypeople. At the same time, there’s also an element of determining how much audiences needed to know, because we could’ve gone deeper, but you don’t want to overload your viewer.”
She sticks to the major bullet points of Boeing’s malfeasance, chief among them the company’s inkling of how wrong things could go. “The thing that was most shocking to me was the report that came out after the first crash, where the FAA and Boeing were aware that this aircraft had a likelihood of crashing 15 times over the course of its life, a catastrophe on average every two years,” Kennedy says. “They knew that and kept the planes in the air, banking on the hope that they’d create a fix before another plane crashed. Who makes that choice?!”
Her rhetorical question has a non-rhetorical answer: Boeing knowingly set themselves up for an expensive, image-destroying scandal because they were already developing a fix for the MCAS, and had banked that nothing would happen before they could implement it. The staggering callousness and hubris behind this decision go hand in hand with greed, an imperative to keep profit margins sky-high at the cost of everything else. Kennedy’s film conveys that Boeing was once the gold standard of American industry, bringing international travel to the world and getting Nasa to the moon by upholding a rigorous degree of excellence on the factory floor. But the ascendance of competitor Airbus (which now holds a dominant market share) put the fear of god in Boeing’s shareholders and CEO, who issued the dual mandate of “cheaper” and “faster”.
“It’s the profit-driven running of companies into the ground,” Kennedy says. “You can look at the energy industry, fossil fuels, the destruction of the environment, all for the sake of profit. You can see it in healthcare, media. Part of my interest in making this film was the hope that it could rise to something bigger. We need to be skeptical of all these industries. There were many decades when Boeing did extraordinary things by focusing on excellence and safety and ingenuity. Those three virtues were seen as the key to profit. It could work, and beautifully. And then they were taken over by a group that decided Wall Street was the end-all, be-all. There needs to be a balance in play, so you have to elect representatives that hold the companies responsible for the public interest, rather than just lining their own pocketbooks.”
Kennedy and the air-safety activists passing through her film – investigative journalist Andy Pasztor, Congressman Peter DeFazio of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, grieving father Michael Stumo – request only that the regulators and manufacturers do their jobs. Likewise, the uppermost decision-makers need to recognize that maximizing quarter-to-quarter cashflow might look good on a stock report, but isn’t the key to longevity. Until then, we have no choice but to advocate for ourselves before depositing our helpless bodies in an aluminum canister on a wing and a prayer.
“I researched airplane safety, and to get on a commercial airplane in most countries is such a safe form of travel,” she says. “I think it’s been 10 years where there have been no commercial airplane crashes, prior to the two, at least just in the United States. The thing to do is research what sort of plane you’ll be taking. I like JetBlue and Delta these days because they fly the A320. There are aircraft that I prefer to fly now. I’m not getting on a 737 Max based on the research I’ve done and the pilots I’ve spoken to, who have ongoing concerns about the safety of that plane.”
This article was amended on 23 February 2022. An earlier version said that Boeing “halted the use of the [747 Max] jets”. To clarify: Boeing was forced to halt the use of the jets after the Ethiopian Airlines crash, when an emergency order was issued by the US grounding the fleet.
Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is available on Netflix now