The FAA certified the Boeing 737 MAX. It delegated 96 percent of that certification to Boeing's own employees. Forty-two federal staff oversaw 1,500 Boeing workers across 448 certification projects. The agency's inspector general warned, two years before the crashes, that the oversight was focused on paperwork rather than safety. The FAA expanded the delegation anyway.
Then 346 people died.
The Regulator investigates the institutional failure of the Federal Aviation Administration-not the crashes themselves, but the regulatory architecture that allowed the aircraft to be certified, to fly, and to kill. The Organization Designation Authorization program that let the inspected company select its own inspectors. The classification decision that hid MCAS from the scrutiny it required. The engineers whose safety determinations were overruled by managers who sided with Boeing. The resource gap that made delegation structurally inevitable. The revolving door that populated the FAA's management level with former industry lobbyists. The international credibility collapse that followed.
Built entirely on the government's own records-six DOT Inspector General reports, the JATR, the GAO, the House Committee investigation, the Expert Panel, and the NTSB-this is the story of an agency that documented its own failure, acknowledged it, enacted reforms, and then documented the failure persisting through the reforms.
Every claim sourced to the documentary record. Both sides of every institutional question presented.
The system documented its own failure. Whether it can correct itself is the open question.
The Boeing Files is a four-book investigative nonfiction series examining the institutional failures across the 737 MAX disasters, FAA regulatory capture, production quality collapse, and the individuals who demanded accountability.
Each book stands alone. Each is built on the documentary record. Where the evidence is clear, the books say so. Where it is contested, they present both analyses. Where it is absent, they note the gap and move on.
No conspiracy theories. No sensationalism. The documents are the story.
