Boeing made missteps and withheld information about the 737 MAX, while US regulators failed to provide proper oversight, leading to a “fundamentally flawed” aircraft that demands tighter rules, a US congressional committee said on Friday.
The preliminary report from the US House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure criticizes Boeing management and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and calls for reforms.
“The fact that multiple technical design missteps or certification blunders were deemed ‘compliant’ by the FAA points to a critical need for legislative and regulatory reforms,” the report said, calling the aircraft “fundamentally flawed and unsafe.”
Photo: Reuters
The committee chair plans to introduce legislation to address the failings in the next few weeks, a committee statement said.
Released days before the anniversary of the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines MAX, the second involving the model, the report cited a list of failings, including Boeing management brushing off engineers’ concerns, and FAA officials ignoring warnings from its own experts.
The congressional investigation aimed “to better understand how the system failed so horribly,” committee chair Peter DeFazio said in a statement.
The committee intends to continue its investigation “to bring into focus the multiple factors that allowed an unairworthy airplane to be put into service, leading to the tragic and avoidable deaths of 346 people,” DeFazio said.
The MAX has been grounded worldwide since the crash, which happened a few months after the Lion Air tragedy in Indonesia in October 2018.
“Both Boeing and the FAA gambled with the public’s safety in the aftermath of the Lion Air crash,” the report said.
Many of the flaws in design and oversight had been revealed over the months since the second crash, but the report lays them out one after the other.
The report describes Boeing’s “fundamentally flawed assumptions” about technology in the plane, including the flight software at the epicenter of both crashes: the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.
The company has a “culture of concealment” that meant “it withheld crucial information” including from pilots, customers and the FAA, the report said.
Senior Boeing leadership “rebuffed concerns” about the production pressures and the effect on safety from a plant supervisor, who called for a temporary halt to manufacturing to address the issues, it said.
“Despite those warnings, Boeing ramped up production instead,” it said.
Regulators exercised “grossly insufficient” review and had a relationship with Boeing that created “inherent conflicts of interest that have jeopardized the safety of the flying public,” it said.
“At times, FAA management has undercut the authority and judgement of its own technical experts and sided with Boeing,” the report said.
The FAA responded to the report saying it would “welcome the scrutiny” from the committee and the investigations into the two crashes “will be a springboard to an even greater level of safety.”
However, the FAA announced a proposed US$19.7 million fine against Boeing for certifying the MAX and its predecessor, the 737 NG, as airworthy when they contained sensors that were not “tested and approved as compatible” with the installed flight systems.
Boeing presented “791 aircraft for airworthiness certification when the aircraft were unairworthy,” the FAA said in a letter to the firm.
In a statement addressing the congressional finding, Boeing said, “We have cooperated extensively for the past year with the committee’s investigation. We will review this preliminary report.”
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