By Dan Catchpole
SEATTLE, May 11 (Reuters) - Boeing hid safety problems with its 737 MAX jet when LOT Polish Airlines picked the popular single-aisle jet in 2016 to anchor its plans to recover from its significant financial troubles at the time, the airline's attorney argued on Monday in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
LOT's plans were derailed when regulators grounded MAX jets around the world in 2019 following two crashes that revealed serious safety problems with a part of the plane's flight-control
systems. LOT sued Boeing in 2021, seeking damages for revenue losses it suffered due to the MAX groundings.
"This case is about Boeing's lies and deception and the devastating financial harm it caused" LOT, the Polish flag carrier's attorney, Anthony Battista, said during opening statements on Monday.
While Boeing was pitching LOT on leasing 737 MAX jets, its engineers were simultaneously grappling with jetliners' tendency for the nose to pitch up under certain conditions. So it created the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), a software feature that automatically pushed the airplane’s nose down in those conditions.
MCAS AT HEART OF DISPUTE
However, Boeing misled the Federal Aviation Administration about the extent of MCAS and difficulties with it in flight testing, so regulators would not require extensive training for pilots already flying the previous 737 models. Extensive simulator training would have made the MAX jets' overall cost for customers much more expensive, and at the time, Boeing was fiercely competing with European rival Airbus'' A320 family of jets for thousands of narrowbody orders around the world.
Switching to the A320 would have required “extensive” - and expensive - simulator training, former LOT executive Maciej Wilk told jurors in court on Monday.
“And the key promise in all this was about pilot training” for the 737 MAX, he said.
Unaware of MCAS's safety problems, LOT committed to leasing 15 jets over the next couple of years.
MCAS played a major role in two crashes that killed 346 people - Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019.
LION AIR AND ETHIOPIAN TRAGEDIES
In public statements after the first crash, Boeing executives assured people that the MAX was safe. Boeing sales people similarly assured LOT that there were no safety problems with the jet.
Like other airlines, LOT continued to fly the aircraft until regulators around the world grounded the MAX after the 2019 crash, when MCAS’s role in the crashes became clear. Twenty months later, regulators allowed the plane to fly again after deeply vetting design changes to MCAS and additional pilot training.
Airlines around the world with 737 MAX aircraft in their fleets, including LOT, resumed flying the updated aircraft.
Boeing's attorney on Monday accused LOT of "crying foul and fraud out of one side of their mouth in the courtroom," while continuing to fly the MAX every day. "Is that how the victim of a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme behaves?"
The U.S. planemaker has already paid out billions to the families of victims of the two crashes, the company has previously told Reuters.
It also paid out huge amounts in out-of-court settlements with airlines hurt by the MAX grounding. The sum has not been publicly disclosed.
LOT is the first airline to take the company to trial in a lawsuit related to the MAX crashes.
(Reporting by Dan Catchpole in Seattle; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
