Ted Cruz blasts Boeing in bipartisan challenge during Senate hearing

(Image credit: Susan Walsh/AP)

last updated 29 October 2019

Boeing was the subject of a rare moment of bipartisanship during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing Tuesday.

Republican and Democratic senators teamed up to grill Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg over the company's response to two crashes within the past year in Indonesia and Ethiopia involving malfunctioning flight-control systems on Boeing's 737 MAX plane.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) focused on a text message exchange from 2016 in which a test pilot complained of difficulties he had managing the software system. "How in the hell did nobody bring this to your attention in February when you produced this to the Justice Department?," Cruz asked, referring to Boeing sharing the text messages with the Justice Department earlier this year. "How did you just read this a couple of weeks ago?"

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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.

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