Boeing, FAA faulted over Max
A panel of international aviation regulators found that Boeing withheld key information about the 737 Max from pilots and regulators, and the US Federal Aviation Administration lacked the expertise to understand an automated flight system implicated in two deadly crashes of Max jets.
In its report issued yesterday, the panel made 12 recommendations for improving the FAA’s certification of new aircraft, including more emphasis on understanding how pilots will handle the increasing amount of automation driving modern planes.
The report focused on FAA approval of a new flight control system called MCAS that automatically pushed the noses of Max jets down – based on faulty readings from a single sensor – before crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people.
During the certification process, Boeing changed the design of MCAS, making it more powerful, but key people at the FAA were not always told.
MCAS evolved ‘‘from a relatively benign system to a not-sobenign system without adequate knowledge by the FAA’’, said the panel’s chief, former US National Transportation Safety Board chairman Christopher Hart. He faulted poor communication, and said there was no indication of intentional wrongdoing.
The Max has been grounded since March. The five-month international review was separate from the FAA’s consideration of whether to recertify the plane once Boeing finishes updates to software and computers. Boeing hopes to win FAA approval before the end of the year.
FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said the agency would review all recommendations from the panel and take appropriate action. ‘‘We welcome this scrutiny and are confident that our openness to these efforts will further bolster aviation safety worldwide.’’
Boeing said it would work with the FAA to review the panel’s recommendations and ‘‘continuously improve the process and approach used to validate and certify airplanes going forward’’.
The panel’s report is likely to increase questions around the FAA’s programme of delegating some safety-related work to employees regulates.
The international panel found signs that Boeing put ‘‘undue pressures’’ on employees who worked on certification of the plane, ‘‘which further erodes the level of assurance’’ in the cooperative approach.
US congressional committees are taking another look at the FAA policy of farming out much of its review work to designated employees of the manufacturers, whose work is supposed to be monitored by FAA inspectors.
FAA officials have pointed to the safety record of American aviation as evidence that the system is working. They have said it would require extra staffing and cost billions for FAA to perform the work itself. The FAA lacks the industry’s technological expertise and has trouble hiring leading-edge engineers.
‘‘As automation becomes more and more complex, pilots are less likely to fully understand it and more likely to have problems,’’ Hart said. Most pilots could handle problems that occurred with automated systems, but ‘‘when some don’t, that’s a crash’’.
American pilot unions, which have been critical of Boeing and the FAA for not disclosing the presence of new flight control software in the Max, praised the report. of the companies it