📚 Boeing Employees Mocked Lion Air Staff For Seeking 737 Max Training, Calling Them 'Idiots.' A Year Later 189 People Died When One of Their Jets Crashed

Indonesia's Lion Air considered putting its pilots through simulator training before flying the Boeing 737 Max but abandoned the idea after the planemaker convinced them in 2017 it was unnecessary, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter and internal company communications. From the report: The next year, 189 people died when a Lion Air 737 Max plunged into the Java Sea, a disaster blamed in part on inadequate training and the crew's unfamiliarity with a new flight-control feature on the Max that malfunctioned. Boeing employees had expressed alarm among themselves over the possibility that one of the company's largest customers might require its pilots to undergo costly simulator training before flying the new 737 model, according to internal messages that have been released to the media. Those messages, included in the more than 100 pages of internal Boeing communications that the company provided to lawmakers and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and released widely on Thursday, had Lion Air's name redacted.

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