Inquiry reported on safety of jetliner
737’s regulation issue, source says
WASHINGTON — U.S. prosecutors are looking into the development of Boeing’s 737 Max jets, a person briefed on the matter revealed Monday, the same day French aviation investigators concluded there were “clear similarities” in the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Max 8 last week and a Lion Air jet in October.
The Justice Department probe will examine the way Boeing was regulated by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the inquiry is not public.
A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., sent a subpoena to someone involved in the plane’s development seeking emails, messages and other communications, the source told The Associated Press.
Authorities began exploring a criminal investigation before the latest crash in Ethiopia involving the new jet, according to people familiar with the probe.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the probe Sunday and also said the Transportation Department’s inspector general is looking into the plane’s anti-stall system. It quotes unidentified people familiar with both cases.
Separately, a Seattle Times investigation published Sunday found that U.S. regulators delegated much of the plane’s safety assessment to Boeing and that the company in turn delivered an analysis with crucial flaws.
The anti-stall system may have been involved in the Oct. 29 crash of a Lion Air jet off of Indonesia that killed 189 people. It’s also under scrutiny in the March 10 crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jet that killed 157.
The Transportation Department’s FAA regulates Chicago-based Boeing and is responsible for certifying that planes can fly safely.
The grand jury issued its subpoena on March 11, one day after the Ethopian Airlines crash, according to the person who spoke to The Associated Press.
Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the Inspector General said Monday they could neither confirm nor deny the existence of any inquiries. The FAA would not comment.
“Boeing does not respond to or comment on questions concerning legal matters, whether internal, litigation, or governmental inquiries,” Boeing spokesman Charles Bickers said in an email.
The company late Monday issued an open letter from its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, addressed to airlines, passengers and the aviation community. Muilenburg did not refer to the reports of the Justice Department probe, but stressed his company is taking actions to ensure its 737 Max jets are safe.
Those include an upcoming release of a software update and related pilot training for the 737 Max to “address concerns” that arose in the aftermath of October’s Lion Air crash, Muilenburg said.
FAA SHIFTED SAFETY
A possible criminal investigation during an aircraft accident investigation is highly unusual. While airline accidents have at times raised criminal issues, such as after the 1996 crash of a ValuJet plane in the Florida Everglades, such cases are the exception.
U.S. Federal Aviation Administration employees warned seven years ago that Boeing had too much sway over safety approvals of new aircraft, prompting an investigation by Transportation Department auditors who confirmed the agency hadn’t done enough to “hold Boeing accountable.”
The 2012 investigation also found that discord over Boeing’s treatment had created a “negative work environment” among FAA employees who approve new and modified aircraft designs, with many of them saying they’d faced retaliation for speaking up. Their concerns pre-dated the 737 Max development.
In recent years, the FAA has shifted more authority over the approval of new aircraft to the manufacturer itself, even allowing Boeing to choose many of the personnel who oversee tests and vouch for safety. In the past few months, Congress expanded the outsourcing arrangement.
“It raises for me the question of whether the agency is properly funded, properly staffed and whether there has been enough independent oversight,” said Jim Hall, who was chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board from 1994 to 2001 and is now an aviation-safety consultant.
At least a portion of the flight-control software suspected in the 737 Max crashes was certified by one or more Boeing employees who worked in the outsourcing arrangement, according to one person familiar with the work who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter.
The FAA has been designating authority for certification work and other tasks to employees of companies it regulates for decades and executives at the agency believe it is necessary to keep up with the demands of industry.
The agency doesn’t have the budget to do every test, and “the use of designees is absolutely necessary,” said Steve Wallace, the former head of accident investigations at the FAA. “For the most part, it works extremely well. There is a very high degree of integrity in the system.”
In a statement on Sunday, the FAA said its “aircraft certification processes are well established and have consistently produced safe aircraft designs,” adding that the “737 Max certification program followed the FAA’s standard certification process.”
ETHIOPIAN REPORT
The French civil aviation investigation bureau BEA said Monday that black box data from the Ethiopian Airlines flight showed the links with the Lion Air crash and will be used for further study.
The Ethiopian Accident Investigation Bureau intends to release a preliminary report within 30 days.
The United States and many other countries have grounded the Max 8s and larger Max 9s as Boeing faces the challenge of proving the jets are safe to fly amid suspicions that faulty sensors and software contributed to the two crashes in less than five months.
Both planes flew with erratic altitude changes that could indicate the pilots struggled to control the aircraft. Shortly after their takeoffs, both crews tried to return to the airports but crashed.
Investigators looking into the Indonesian crash are examining whether software automatically pushed the plane’s nose down repeatedly, and whether the Lion Air pilots knew how to solve that problem. Ethiopian Airlines says its pilots received special training on the software.
Dennis Tajer, an American Airlines pilot and a spokesman for their union, said Boeing held a discussion with airlines last Thursday but did not invite pilots at American or Southwest, the two U.S. carriers that use the same version of the Max that crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
Tajer said airline officials told the unions that Boeing intends to offer pilots about a 15-minute iPad course to train them on the new flight-control software on Max jets that is suspected of playing a role in the crashes. He called that amount of training unacceptable.
“Our sense is it’s a rush to comply — ‘let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,’” Tajer said. “I’m in a rush to protect my passengers.”
A spokesman for the pilots’ union at Southwest Airlines also said Boeing representatives told that union they expected the upgrade to be ready the end of January.
The spokesman, Mike Trevino, said Boeing never followed up to explain why that deadline passed without an upgrade. Boeing was expected to submit a proposed fix to the FAA in early January. Information for this article was contributed by Hope Yen, Tom Krisher, David Koenig and Michael Balsamo of The Associated Press; and by Alan Levin, Peter Robison, Margaret Newkirk, Nizar Manek, Michael Sasso, Rita Devlin Marier, Irene García Pérez and Chris Strohm of Bloomberg News.