2 Planes Fall Out of the Sky — Killing Hundreds — and New Documentary Investigates How

Boeing 737 MAX airplane.Photo: Stephen Brashear/Getty

The details of the hours, days and weeks after March 10, 2019, are still hard to remember for Michael Stumo. All he knows is that they were paralyzing.

“You can’t think,” he says. “You can’t move through the day.”

March 10 is when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 — a new aircraft, the Boeing 737 MAX 8 — fell out of the sky shortly after takeoff in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa killing all 157 people on board. Among the dead was Stumo’s daughter, 24-year old Samya Rose Stumo.

Samya, who was described in remembrances as “one of a kind,” with “so much promise, so much potential” ahead of her, had been working in Ethiopia with a health care nonprofit, ThinkWell.

It was an unthinkable tragedy compounding unthinkable tragedy: Twenty years earlier, Michael and his wife, Nadia, had watched another child — 2-year-old Nels — die of cancer.

“I did not believe Samya could be on that plane. I could not lose another child,” her dad said in a statementshortly after the crash. He and his wife, who also share son Tor, had gone to Ethiopia hoping, somehow, to find their daughter.

“We flew there to bring her home. But we learned there were no survivors,” Michael said afterward. “Then we learned we could not bring home her body or even fragments of her body.”

And so: “I stood on that Ethiopian agricultural field, with my family, looking at the crater. Feeling her,” he said.

Years later, Michael still carries Samya with him.

“We were on the ground in Ethiopia the week of the crash, trying to recover Samya’s body, and we were unable to,” he told PEOPLE in a recent interview, holding up a photo of his daughter during nearly the entirety of the conversation.

Michael, his family and the families of the other victims spent the months and years after the tragedy trying to determine what caused it — and why it seemed so eerily similar to another airplane crash just months earlier, also of a 737 MAX.

In October 2018, just as in the March 2019 crash, a Boeing plane plummeted to earth not long after takeover, the nose of the aircraft diving down, down, down to the ground. The 189 passengers and crew onboard were all killed.

Deadly crashes on that scale are now exceedingly rare. Statistically speaking, they’re almost impossible. But the two appeared linked.

In the years since, Michael Stumo has spent countless hours talking to members of Congress, journalists and the general public. In more recent months, he has also spoken at length withRory Kennedy, a documentarian and the youngest child of late Sen.Robert F. Kennedy.

Samya Rose Stumo.Graeme Jennings-Pool/Getty

The younger Kennedy is the director of the new Netflix documentaryDownfall: The Case Against Boeing, which premiered on Friday and which features Stumo and other victims' family members.

The 53-year-old filmmaker’s previous projects have centered on social issues like addiction, immigration and the treatment of prisoners of war. She wanted to investigate Boeing, she tells PEOPLE, because the disasters were so unprecedented.

“I watched the first plane crash with horror and five months later, the second plane crash,” Kennedy says. “It seemed like these two planes — both 737 MAX — crashing within five months of each other … this just doesn’t happen in modern aviation.”

Boeing, which has agreed to various fines and settlements, says it has since made “significant changes” both at a corporate level and to the MCAS system at the center of the investigations of the two crashes.

The company points to the fact that its 737 MAX planes have returned to service worldwide with little issue. More on its response to the Netflix documentary is below.

The makings of the 737 MAX

Kennedy, who directedDownfall, and her husband, writer Mark Bailey, spoke to Boeing employees, dozens of reporters, surviving family members and lawmakers to chart what the documentary portrays as a culture of concealment and deceit at the company. But it didn’t sprout up overnight, sources said.

As the documentary argues, Boeing — the world’s largest aerospace company and a historically well-respected name in commercial jetliners — fell victim to the influence of Wall Street when it merged with its longtime rival, McDonnell Douglas, in 1997. That consolidation created a behemoth, one that the film alleges placed a high value on profits.

After the merger, ex-employees say in the film, everything changed. Boeing began looking for ways to compete as the aerospace industry began to grow more crowded.

The 737 MAX also contained a new type of software: MCAS, short for Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.

Worried that the plane would go nose-up due to the size of its engine, MCAS was a software designed to instead level it out. But the system grew more powerful as the plane neared production, raising the specter that it could override its own pilots. Former Boeing staffers featured inDownfallsay there were worries about MCAS — but those concerns, they claim, were delivered in a high-pressure environment, amid an overriding focus on getting planes in the sky.

To fly a plane equipped with MCAS would require pilot training on a flight simulator, per FAA regulations. But requiring more hours of pilot training and heavier scrutiny from regulators could lead to increased costs and smaller profits. So Boeing, as depicted inDownfalland as suggested in internal documents, decided not to call attention to the MCAS system in pilot training manuals.

The initial training for pilots who flew the 737 MAX required justone hour of lessons via an iPad. The MCAS system was not mentioned.

When the MAX launched, Boeing sold over 5,000 of the planes in record time, making it the fastest-selling airplane in company history. Profits soared, but pilots remained in the dark about the powerful software within the new aircraft.

A ‘catastrophic error’

According toDownfalland subsequent reports, the MCAS system on the 737 MAX only utilized one sensor. So if an airplane hit something in the sky — even something as small as a balloon or a bird — the sensor could send the wrong message to the system, which would then try to take over the plane from the pilot, fighting against them for control.

That’s what appeared to happen to Lion Air Flight 610 which, 13 minutes after taking off from Soekarno–Hatta International Airport in Jakarta on Oct. 2018, crashed into the Java Sea.

The first plane crash was beyond horrifying, Michael Stumo says now. That it happened again just months later was “criminal.”

In a risk assessment performed after that first 737 MAX crash, the FAA determined the problem was such that it could lead to one fatal crash of the aircraft every two years, which would make it the most dangerous modern jet ever built.

Still, the agency didn’t ground the 737 MAX after the first crash — instead, it certified the aircraft in anticipation of Boeing fixing the software and telling pilots how to properly operate it.

It wasn’t enough. In March 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 also crashed, also killing everyone, including Stumo’s daughter.

Investigators have since found that the sensor on both planes failed within minutes of taking off. AsDownfalldetails in a scene recreated using CGI technology, the MCAS system rebelled against the pilots, eventually forcing the planes to nose-dive into the earth below.

“It was hard to watch the computer simulations when the plane was going down, thinking about Samya’s experience,” Stumo says of his experience viewing the documentary. “But it’s important to get the story out. We’ve been working ever since the crashes — once we got up off the floor and figured out FAA wasn’t going to fix this without pressure. We’ve been reliving it a lot.”

It wasn’t until three days after that second crash, in March 2019, that the 737 MAX was grounded.

It began flying again in December 2020, and Boeing says that the plane is now safe, directing PEOPLE to a website detailingthe changes that have been madeto the line of aircraft since the crashes.

That is little comfort to Stumo.

“It was inexcusable, because they had direct notice about the MCAS,” he tells PEOPLE. “They could have fixed it, but they didn’t. It was criminal.”

‘Covering up’: What Boeing knew

What executives at the company knew about MCAS remains a point of contention. In the years since the crashes, the company has at timesblamed pilot error. Elsewhere, it and the Department of Justice have pointed the finger at “two former Boeing employeesand their intentional failure to inform the FAA AEG, the group within the FAA responsible for making pilot training determinations, about changes to theManeuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.”

But internal documents show that some at the company did express concerns about MCAS early on, even prior to either crash.

Appearing beforetwo congressional committees in October 2019, former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg confirmed that Boeingknew of the test pilot concernsabout the MCAS system in early 2019 — but he said he didn’t know details of those conversations until later.

“I was involved in the document collection process, but I relied on my team to get the documents to the appropriate authorities,” Muilenburg insisted. “I didn’t get the details of the conversation until recently.”

Muilenburg was ultimately ousted from his role at Boeing; he received more than $62 million in stock and pension.

Then there’s the question of the FAA’s role, which multiple victims' families, activities and politicians have denounced.

In a press conference in April 2019, longtime political activist Ralph Nader — who is, as it happens, also Samya’s great uncle — criticized “thecozy relationshipbetween the patsy FAA [and] and the Boeing company.”

As House Oversight Committee looking into the crashes determined, the agency engaged in “grossly insufficient oversight” of Boeing and excessively delegated many responsibilities to the company itself rather than doing all the regulatory work itself.

Dennis Muilenburg.Alex Wong/Getty

A settlement but no justice, families say

In 2021, Boeing reached a settlement with the Department of Justice over “a criminal charge related to a conspiracy to defraud the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aircraft Evaluation Group.”

As part of that settlement, Boeing was required to pay “a criminal monetary penalty of $243.6 million,” plus compensation payments to airlines of $1.77 billion and the establishment of a $500 million crash-victim beneficiaries fund to compensate the heirs, relatives, and legal beneficiaries of the 346 passengers who died," federal authorities said.

The announcement of the settlement, Stumo says now, was a kick in the gut to relatives of those who died in the plane crashes: “The global WhatsApp chat among the families exploded in renewed grief, anger and surprise.”

Kennedy, meanwhile, calls the money “a slap on the wrist.”

“Here you have a situation where 346 people have died. Boeing was responsible for that. And nobody at Boeing has served any time. If you killed somebody, if I killed somebody, we would go to jail. So why is Boeing protected?” she says.

Later in 2021, Boeingalso reached a settlementwith families of those killed in the Ethiopian crash.

Stumo maintains that to this day, Boeing hasn’t reached out directly to the families, instead speaking to them via attorneys or to the media, at press conferences.

“Early on, they apologized to the cameras for the crashes, but never to us,” he says.

For the families affected, the story is ongoing. They continueto fight, recently accusing the Department of Justice of denying them an opportunity to participate in a criminal investigation into Boeing (Stumo cites a 2004 law meant to protect victims of crime).

Boeing 737 Max.JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty

Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft — after a nearly two-year grounding and changes — is back in the sky. But Kennedy and Stumo say they won’t be boarding.

“Everyone needs to avoid the MAX,” Stumo says.

Asked to respond to the film, Boeing offered PEOPLE a statement that read, in part: “We remember those lost on Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. Since the accidents, Boeing has made significant changes as a company, and to the design of the 737 MAX, to ensure that accidents like those never happen again. We have full confidence in the airplane’s safety.”

Boeing added that, “Since December 2020, more than 185 out of 195 countries have approved a return to service” for the 737 MAX and that “more than 35 airlines globally have safely operated the 737 MAX for more than 360,000 revenue flights and 900,000 flight hours, with schedule reliability above 99%.”

Boeing also pointed PEOPLE to aNovember 2020 news conferencein which FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said the design changes made to the 737 MAX in the wake of the crashes “eliminate the possibility of an accident occurring that is in any way similar to the Lion Air and Ethiopian accidents. That’s the bottom line.”

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Kennedy says many of the airline pilots she interviewed for the film, however, have expressed ongoing safety concerns regarding the MAX.

“Personally, I never checked what kind of plane I was flying prior to starting to make this film,” she says. “But I and my family and friends now check religiously.”

“For so many of us who fly, we go down that jetway, and we get on the plane and we think, This airline is going to look out for us and this manufacturer is going to make sure the plane is safe,” she says. “And they’re all incentivized to make sure this thing doesn’t fall out of the sky … and that Congress and the regulators are going to do their jobs.”

“What was so heartbreaking about this story,” she says, “is that none of them did their job.”

Downfallis available now on Netflix.

source: people.com