Boeing Cut Corners and Concealed Information Ahead of Plane Crashes, According to Netflix’s ‘Downfall’

Nervous fliers may want to think twice before hitting play on Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, a harrowing Netflix documentary that investigates the mistakes and negligence that led to two Boeing MAX 737 plane crashes within the span of just five months. Those crashes—which killed 346 people in total, from Lion Air Flight 610 on October 29, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, 2019—were a shock to the public, especially when it became clear it was the planes, not the pilot, that was the problem. Airplanes are supposed to be safer than cars… right?

Industry experts were shocked, too—not necessarily because nothing ever goes wrong with planes, but more because nothing ever goes wrong with planes made by Boeing. Until this catastrophe, Boeing had been the largest and most reliable plane manufacturing company in the world. Boeing’s rep was so strong, in fact, that before details of the first crash came to light, industry insiders were quick to blame the pilot, rather than the new plane model, Boeing 737 MAX, which had rolled out in 2017.

“No one thought it was the airplane,” said The Air Current editor-in-chief in a talking head interview for Downfall. “I am in print being asked what this could possibly be, and I said, ‘I would be phenomenally surprised if it was related to any part of the airplane’s design.’ I mean, it was a Boeing.” Then the plane’s black box was discovered, revealing data that showed the pilot followed all of the protocols to a tee. And yet, the plane still malfunctioned. Five months later, it happened again. It quickly became clear that somewhere along the way, Boeing had slipped. In Downfall, director Rory Kennedy attempts to get to the bottom of what, exactly, went wrong.

While the film—which premiered at Sundance Film Festival and is now streaming on Netflix—does a good job of distilling the complicated engineering malfunction that caused the two planes to crash, the more interesting part of the documentary is when Kennedy investigates how, exactly, Boeing could have let this mistake slip through the cracks. His conclusion lands the blame squarely on Boeing, which, the film argues, took its eye off safety, cut corners, and outright lied, largely in the name of increasing stock prices and making more money for the executives at the top.

Many of the people interviewed for the film point to Boeing’s 1997 merger with its rival plane manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, as the beginning of the downfall. Former employees said led to a shift in company culture away from expensive, meticulous engineering to a cut-throat, cost-saving greedy corporate culture. The merger came after the Wall Street boom in the ’80s—stock values were everything, and CEOs wanted bigger and bigger returns—and immediately, employees felt the shift at Boeing.

“Not long after the merger, there was a major campaign launched called ShareValue,” Rick Ludtke, a cockpit designer on the Max, says in the film. “The idea was that they wanted everybody to be aware of the stock price, and they wanted everybody working together to increase the stock value.” Suddenly, the company cared a lot less about safety, and a lot more about saving money.

“They were reducing the number of people working, expecting everyone to do more with less,” said Ludtke. Another former employee, Cynthia Cole, a test and systems engineer at Boeing for 32 years, added, “Before McDonnell Douglas, we didn’t take shortcuts. It wasn’t the Boeing culture. You build it right, and safely, and the profits will follow. But all of that changed.” Debris was getting left on the manufacturing floor, one employee said. Important safety protocols were being skipped entirely, said another. (Boeing disputes these claims as false, in a statement at the end of the film.)

Cut to the mid-2010s, after over 15 years of this new, cutting corners company culture. Boeing’s biggest rival, the European company Airbus, was getting closer and closer to taking Boeing’s crown, and the American company was under pressure to roll out a shiny new plane model—something that was sure to sell more planes and give the Boeing stock a boost. Equally, the company felt pressure to make sure the new plane model would not require costly, and time-consuming, pilot training. So came the Boeing MAX 737, which, the company told its employees, was similar enough to the 40-year-old 737 models that no extensive pilot training was needed. In reality, Downfall reveals, the company intentionally covered up significant changes to the new model that would require pilot retraining—and those changes were ultimately what led to both crashes.

Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR), the Chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, obtained documents from Boeing that he calls “damning.” Said DeFazio in the doc, “We found out that a group of Boeing employees had held a meeting and discussed the MCAS system,” referring to the new system on the MAX plane model that caused both crashes. After expressing worry that the MCAS system would trigger training from the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing “determined that they would conceal the existence to anybody outside of Boeing, of the MCAS system.”

Before the crash, the 737 MAX sold very well. A lot of Boeing executives no doubt made a lot of money. It just came at the cost of 346 lives and the loss of public trust. The film ends on a somewhat ominous note—after being grounded for two years and having the MCAS system reworked, the MAX returned to the air in November 2020, with Boeing’s assurance that the plane is safe. But Downfall leaves the question hanging: Can passengers ever trust a Boeing plane again?

Watch Downfall: The Case Against Boeing on Netflix