Boeing received an email from the chief pilot at Ethiopian Airlines on December 1, 2018 with several questions, reports the New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/us/politics/boeing-email-ethiopian-airlines.html

in essence the pilot was asking for direction. "If we see a series of warnings on the new 737 Max, he posed, what do we do?"

Newly revealed correspondence indicates that a Boeing senior official counseled that the company could answer a pilot’s safety question, but it did not.