Congressional Report Faults Boeing on MAX Design, FAA for Lax Oversight--Update
March 06 2020 - 3:48PM
Dow Jones News
By Andy Pasztor
Boeing Co.'s engineering mistakes and "culture of concealment,"
coupled with insufficient federal safety oversight, led to two
fatal crashes of the plane maker's 737 MAX aircraft, House
investigators said in a report released Friday.
The preliminary findings, issued by Democrats on the House
Transportation Committee, describe in stark terms the engineering
and regulatory lapses revealed in five public hearings over the
past year into the design and certification of the MAX, which was
grounded around the world last March following a second crash of
the passenger jet.
The crashes of the Ethiopian Airlines flight and the Lion Air
flight five months earlier, claimed a total of 346 lives. The
protracted grounding continues as Boeing works on software fixes
and develops pilot-training requirements that will win the approval
of regulators. Boeing halted the aircraft's production in
January.
Friday's report details Boeing's determination at various levels
-- years before the MAX was approved by the Federal Aviation
Administration -- to avoid putting pilots through costly
ground-simulator training. That single-minded goal was evident
across Boeing's engineering, marketing and management ranks,
according to the report, and resulted in various efforts to mislead
or withhold information from FAA officials during the lengthy
certification process.
Both crashes occurred after pilots failed to counteract a new
automated flight-control feature -- details of which they didn't
know -- that misfired to repeatedly and aggressively push down the
nose of their aircraft.
The 13-page congressional report offers new details about what
it described as Boeing's improper conduct related to MAX, including
fresh insight into the period during the plane's development and in
the weeks after the first crash.
In July 2014, three years before the MAX started flying
passengers and two years before the FAA made a decision regarding
the extent of mandatory pilot training, the report says Boeing
issued a press release seemingly prejudging the regulatory process.
The company said pilots already flying earlier 737 models "will not
require a simulator course to transition to the 737 MAX." According
to the report, Boeing made the same pledge to airliner customers,
including Ethiopian Airlines.
During the plane's development, Boeing successfully argued to
remove references to the flight-control system, known as MCAS, from
official manuals. As the House committee revealed earlier, the
company also went to great lengths to keep FAA officials from
scrutinizing and potentially recognizing the hazards of the system,
even referring to it by another name.
The FAA's oversight effort, according to the report, was
"grossly insufficient...(and) the FAA failed in its duty to
identify key safety problems."
A Boeing spokesman didn't have an immediate comment Friday. The
FAA said the agency welcomes the scrutiny and the lessons from the
two crashes would bolster aviation safety.
The report also offered fresh insight into Boeing's actions
after the first crash. The panel concluded that Boeing continued to
minimize the importance of MCAS -- and persisted in deflecting the
need for additional pilot training -- even in the wake of the Lion
Air crash in October 2018 and stepped-up FAA assessments of the
system's hazards.
Based on hundreds of thousands of pages of internal documents
and other material Boeing turned over to the committee, the report
spells out steps Boeing took to defend itself in the weeks after
Lion Air. At the time, the report indicates, Boeing maintained that
design changes that had made MCAS more powerful complied with all
safety rules and requirements.
Despite the Lion Air crash and the public outcry it created,
according to House investigators, Boeing sought to persuade the FAA
to downgrade training requirements on MAX jets in general. The
report says that effort came in the face of regulators' warnings
that the company's technical evaluation of the issue was at odds
with the views of FAA experts.
The report reiterates earlier complaints by lawmakers that the
Chicago-based aerospace giant was able to exert undue influence
over the FAA, partly because regulators delegated much of their
oversight responsibilities to Boeing employees authorized to act on
the government's behalf.
It also detailed examples of FAA managers overruling safety
concerns of their own technical experts related to another Boeing
airliner, the Boeing 787.
The House committee intends to continue its probe, but Rep.
Peter DeFazio, the Oregon Democrat who chairs the panel, surprised
some industry officials by opting to release the preliminary report
days before the anniversary of the Ethiopian Airlines MAX crash in
March 2019.
Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 06, 2020 15:33 ET (20:33 GMT)
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