PENNY WISE, POUND FOOLISH: Former Boeing Engineers Say Relentless Cost-Cutting Sacrificed Safety.

Boeing got what it wanted: Pilots moving from a 737-800 to the 737 Max would need at most Level B training, which they could complete in an hour or two on an iPad. That let airlines deploy the $120 million plane more quickly. For Boeing, it was an important selling point that gave customers one less reason to defect to its European rival Airbus SE.

Since the crashes of two Maxes within five months—a Lion Air flight last October and an Ethiopian Airlines flight this March—the pressure and maneuvering around simulator training has struck Ludtke as essential to understanding how an emphasis on costs twisted a process that’s supposed to produce the best, safest planes. “They could have done better and should have done better, but better wasn’t an option,” says Ludtke, who started at Boeing in 1996 and holds two U.S. patents for flight crew alerting systems. Federal investigators probing the Max recently interviewed Ludtke for hours about the connection between simulator requirements and the new software system linked to the crashes, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS.

Managers didn’t merely insist to employees that no designs should lead to Level D training. They also made their desires known to the FAA team in charge of 737 training requirements, which was led by Stacey Klein, who’d previously been a pilot at now-defunct Skyway Airlines for six years. “She had no engineering background, her airplane experience was very limited,” Ludtke says. “It was just an impossible scenario.”

What a mess.