Prosecutors examine Boeing’s ties to regulator

Boeing and US aviation regulators are under investigation in Washington amid suspicion that lax practices led to an unsafe system on new airliners that have crashed twice in five months.

Prosecutors and the Department of Transportation are scrutinising how the Boeing 737 Max series was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) despite reported qualms among staff about its stabilising system.

On Monday last week, a day after Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed killing 157 people, a grand jury in Washington issued a summons to at least one person who worked on the Max series development and demanded documents and emails, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The subpoena listed as a contact a prosecutor from the Justice Department’s criminal division. The inquiry opened after the crash in Indonesia of a Lion Air Boeing 737 in October with the loss of 189 lives, but was not made public.

Washington officials and a congressional committee are examining the way that the FAA outsourced much of its airworthiness certification to Boeing employees who were under pressure to speed up the process to market of a more fuelefficient version of the 737.

The debate over flight safety has been joined by Chesley Sullenberger, 68, who won global admiration when he put his Airbus A320 down on the Hudson River a decade ago after a bird strike stopped the engines.

‘‘It has been obvious since the Lion Air crash that a redesign of the 737 Max 8 has been urgently needed, yet has still not been done, and the announced proposed fixes do not go far enough,’’ Sullenberger wrote on Facebook.

He also criticised Ethiopian Airlines for putting an inexperienced co-pilot into the cockpit. The junior pilot’s 200 hours of flying experience was ‘‘an absurdly low amount for someone in the cockpit of a jet airliner,’’ he wrote. – The Times