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 predetermining 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 was "grossly insufficient and...the FAA failed in its duty to identify key safety problems," according to the report.

The FAA said the agency welcomes the scrutiny and the lessons from the two crashes would bolster aviation safety.

A Boeing spokesman said, "We have cooperated extensively for the past year with the committee's investigation; we will review this preliminary report."

The report offered fresh insight into Boeing's actions after the first crash in Indonesia. 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 the Lion Air crash. 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, Boeing sought to persuade the FAA to downgrade training requirements on MAX jets in general, according to House investigators. Their report says the effort by Boeing 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 Democratic-controlled House committee intends to continue its probe, but Rep. Peter DeFazio, the Oregon Democrat who chairs the panel, surprised some industry officials and prompted blowback from Republican members by opting to release a preliminary report. Coming days before the anniversary of the Ethiopian Airlines MAX crash in March 2019, Democrats hope the material will provide momentum for significant legislative changes tightening FAA oversight.

Rep. DeFazio sought to avoid a partisan rupture during the committee hearings. But hours after the report came out, a pair of senior GOP panel members issued a rebuttal suggesting its conclusions were premature and potentially biased. The Republican statement said other reviews of the FAA's approval process for new aircraft designs haven't concluded the "system is broken or in need of wholesale dismantlement."

The minority report said that rather than rushing out a report to meet an artificial timeline, "we need to get this right" and "fix the problems that need to be fixed to make our fundamentally safe system even safer."

While the document lays out a pattern of Boeing moves "to obfuscate information about the operation of the aircraft," it equally targets the FAA for inadequate safeguards and disjointed internal communications.

Even following the Lion Air crash, according to House investigators, the FAA missed red flags that should have alerted it about the extent of Boeing's previous failure to adequately test the combined impact of various sensor and other malfunctions that could result in MCAS activation. Boeing and the FAA quickly agreed the system's software needed a major redesign, though the report indicates FAA officials allowed the plane to keep flying despite multiple prior certification blunders pertaining to the MAX.

Separately, in Boeing's latest reported production lapse, the FAA on Friday proposed a $19.7 million penalty against the company for installing unapproved sensors on nearly 800 jetliners, including 173 of its 737 MAX models.

The alleged missteps, extending from mid-2015 to the spring of 2019, highlight Boeing failures to comply with its own quality-control rules covering aircraft production. The proposed civil penalty, at the upper end of what regulators could seek based on the number of affected aircraft, also reflects increased FAA scrutiny of Boeing's assembly-line safeguards.

Covering more than 600 earlier 737 models, the enforcement case stems from alleged Boeing slip-ups in failing to ensure sensors associated with certain windshield cockpit displays had been approved by regulators for specific applications. The letter to Boeing laying out the details, dated Friday, doesn't indicate any operational safety incidents as a result of the alleged violations.

A Boeing spokesman said the company has done a thorough internal review and implemented changes to address the FAA's concerns.

Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 06, 2020 18:46 ET (23:46 GMT)

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