BA Boeing Co

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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