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Topline: Boeing has released hundreds of pages of messages with disparaging comments by employees about the safety and production of the now-grounded 737 MAX, plunging the company and its beleaguered bestseller into further crisis.

• The world’s largest planemaker publicly released the messages on Thursday, which they had disclosed to the FAA in December, in the interests of transparency. The messages include staff criticizing the 737 MAX and mocking management and aviation regulators in instant messages and emails between 2013 and 2018.
• In one exchange between two employees in February 2018, a staffer asked: “Would you put your family on a MAX simulated trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.” Another wrote in April 2017: “This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” in reference to issues with plane equipment. 
• The messages also suggest inadequate checks by the Federal Aviation Authority, with an unnamed employee writing in February 2017 that the FAA failed to write up many issues, and were “neither thorough nor demanding.” 
• In a follow-up statement, Boeing said the messages “do not reflect the company we are and need to be, and they are completely unacceptable”. The FAA said the tone and language of the messages was “disappointing.”
• All the messages occurred long before the 737 MAX was grounded in March 2019, after two crashes—in October 2018 and March 2019—in which 346 people died. Investigators say the crashes were linked to errors with the MCAS anti-stall system, a key safety feature.
• Minutes from a meeting as far back as 2013 suggest employees were trying to bypass further regulatory checks by downplaying the MCAS as an additional function, instead of a new one that required further training to operate. Messages show that Boeing staff tried to avoid requiring 737 Next Generation-trained pilots to take simulator training to fly the new 737 MAX model.
• Since the grounding, several former employees have made allegations about cost-cutting measures and a culture of cutting corners to meet tight production schedules for Boeing’s new flagship aircraft.

Crucial quote: In a June 2018 email, one employee makes a point about company culture, saying: “I don’t know how to fix these things … it’s systemic. It’s culture. It’s the fact we have a senior leadership team that understand very little about the business and yet are driving us to certain objectives.”

Chief critics: Lawmakers piled onto the planemaker, including Representative Peter DeFazio, chair of the House transportation committee. He said in a statement: “[The emails] paint a deeply disturbing picture of the lengths Boeing was apparently willing to go to in order to evade scrutiny from regulators, flight crews, and the flying public, even as its own employees were sounding alarms internally. I can only imagine how painful it must be for the families of the 346 victims to read these new documents that detail some of the earliest and most fundamental errors in the decisions that went into the fatally flawed aircraft.”

Key background: Boeing has sought to repair the damage to its reputation since the grounding of the MAX. This week, it changed its tune on the need for pilots to undergo simulator training to operate the 737 MAX. A key selling point for the 737 MAX was that airlines could transfer pilots trained for the 737 Next Generation, a workhorse plane for many airlines, onto the new fuel-efficient Boeing aircraft with no delays for retraining. A Department of Justice criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the 737 MAX incidents is ongoing.

Tangent: A Boeing 737-800NG plane, operated by Ukraine International Airlines (UIA), crashed on Wednesday, with U.S., Canadian and U.K officials saying they now believe the plane was shot down, perhaps unintentionally, by an Iranian missile. Iranian officials have denied this, and initially blamed the crash on an engine failure. Boeing shares rose 2% on Thursday after the initial fears of another safety-related crash seemed increasingly unlikely. The aircraft model, a predecessor to the 737 MAX, has had a good safety record, and the UIA plane in question was just three years old.