US: Boeing CEO to tell Congress: ‘We know we made mistakes’

Boeing’s CE, Dennis A. Muilenburg, will acknowledge some of the company’s failings on Tuesday when he appears before a Senate committee investigating the crashes of two 737 Max jets that killed 346 people. “We know we made mistakes and got some things wrong,” Muilenburg plans to tell the lawmakers, according to Boeing. “We own that, and we are fixing them.” Muilenburg has made similar comments in speeches but his appearances this week will be the first time Boeing executives have publicly addressed Congress about the crashes, which have cost the company billions of dollars and raised new questions about government oversight of the aviation industry. Muilenburg will face the Senate on the first anniversary of the crash of Lion Air Flight 610, which was the first Max to crash. On Wednesday, he will appear in front of a House committee. For Muilenburg and Boeing, the stakes could not be higher. “We know that both accidents involved the repeated activation of a flight control software function called MCAS, which responded to erroneous signals from a sensor that measures the airplane’s angle of attack,” his prepared remarks say. Muilenburg also will address criticism that Boeing did not inform airlines about the new system before the crashes. During the development of the plane, Boeing made the system more powerful, and a Boeing pilot working on the Max, Mark Forkner, requested that the FAA remove mention of the system from the plane’s training manual. “Our airline customers and their pilots have told us they don’t believe we communicated enough about MCAS — and we’ve heard them,” Muilenburg plans to say. Story has more.<br/>