FAA’s ‘self-certification’ criticized after 737 crash
The US aircraft industry is moving toward using its own employees to certify the safety of aircraft, a departure from prior practices at the Federal Aviation Administration that could endanger air safety, said the former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
James Hall expressed his views in an opinion piece in The New York Times, one day after the FAA’s decision on Wednesday to ground Boeing’s MAX 8 and MAX 9 planes following fatal crashes of the craft in Indonesia in October and in Ethiopia on March 10.
China was the first to ground all Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes, followed by other countries.
“We took immediate action to ground the Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets and will resume the commercial operation after investigation to ensure flight safety. It indeed shows the responsibility for protecting people’s safety and the principle of zero tolerance on safety hazards in the civil aviation industry,” said Feng Zhenglin, head of the Civil Aviation Administration of China.
The successive crashes happening to Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft indicate the safety hazards behind the jets, he added.
China has the largest number of 737 Max aircraft in operation, so it’s reasonable and justified to temporarily ground the operation of the jets for the sake of people’s safety before Boeing announces what caused the crashes and discovers all possible loopholes, said Li Xiaojin, a professor of aviation economics at the Civil Aviation University in Tianjin,
Hall wrote that under a 2005 change in the FAA’s regulatory responsibility, “rather than naming and supervising its own ‘designated airworthiness representative’, the agency decided to allow Boeing and other manufacturers who qualified under the revised procedures to select their own employees to certify the safety of their aircraft”.
“In justifying this change, the agency said at the time that it would save the aviation industry about $25 billion from 2006 to 2015. Therefore, the manufacturer is providing oversight of itself. This is a worrying move toward industry self-certification,” he said.
Hall served as chairman of the US National Transportation Safety Board from 1994 to 2001. The board investigates plane crashes, certain types of highway crashes, ship and marine accidents, pipeline incidents and railroad accidents. The FAA regulates civil aviation and runs the nation’s air traffic control system.
Some analysts don’t fully agree with Hall’s critique. They said that much of the technology in contemporary aircraft has outstripped the ability of regulators to keep up with advancements. They point out that the FAA’s practice of relying on industry insiders is no different from the US Food and Drug Administration’s reliance on experts from the companies it regulates, state bar associations overseeing the conduct of attorneys and taking disciplinary action when needed, or a local police department investigating an officer-involved shooting.
“There is nothing insidious here,” said Robert Mann, president of R.W. Mann & Co airline consultants in Port Washington, New York. “This is a widespread practice and occurs in other industries. The designated representative system has been used for years and is also used in Europe. Innovation often outpaces the regulators.”
Separate issue
Mann said Boeing could have done a better job sharing information about how to over-ride the anti-stall system on Boeing 737 MAX planes, but that is a separate issue from the use of representatives from aircraft builders to review the safety of new aircraft.
Sharing information to resolve problems is the key to making air travel safe, Mann said.
Scott Hamilton, managing director of Leeham Co, an aviation consultancy in Seattle, took a less sanguine view of the issue and said the FAA has been underfunded for years.
“The trouble is any time you have the applicant doing its own inspections, you risk the absence of an outside viewpoint,” Hamilton told China Daily. “But it’s not in the interest of the applicant — Boeing or whoever — to approve something that’s unsafe and will harm or kill people.”