This book, which was a birthday present from my parents, does an outstanding job of answering the question: what went wrong with the Boeing 737-MAX?

Robison takes a longitudinal view, giving a fast-paced account of the history of Boeing. The book notes how cost-cutting and the side-lining of expert engineers in favour of project managers led to a toxic workplace and, ultimately, a failure to prioritise safety over other considerations.

Robison, in concert with the inquiries into the plane crashes, makes the point that the failures in the design of the 737-MAX were not complex. The plane was loaded with software which brought the nose down, intended to avoid a stall by stopping the plane from climbing too steeply. However, this system relied on a single sensor to work out the angle of the climb. If the single sensor failed, the computer would put the plane into a dive. This system, which was new to the 787-MAX, was not described in the flight manual, and pilots were not made aware of its existence through training—so the plane would dive, and the pilots would have no way to understand what was going on, let alone avoid a crash.

Robison’s unemotional, journalistic style of writing sets all of this out plainly. The horror of the book comes from the sheer familiarity of the processes he describes: the prioritisation of delivering things ‘on time’ rather than making sure they were safe, the way that problems were obscured through corporate jargon, the siloed working that hindered cooperation and communication between teams, the inability of those with expert knowledge to influence decisions. You could draw endless parallels between the problems identified in this book and the problems identified in Module 1 of the UK COVID Inquiry.

There was one nugget that particularly stood out. During the implementation of a particular decision, regular ‘go / no go’ meetings were renamed ‘go / go’ meetings, as ‘not going’ was no longer an option, whatever the safety considerations. I recently heard of another organisation (not in aviation) rebranding equivalent meetings in exactly the same way with exactly the same rationale.

This kind of corporate failure is pervasive: this book is essential reading to understand and challenge it.