FAA faces scrutiny on Boeing 737 Max certification
Senior leaders from the Federal Aviation Administration defended the certification of the 737 Max at a Senate hearing Wednesday, but raised the possibility of changing the process for approving new aircraft.
“We continue to hear of more problems with FAA’s certification of the 737 Max aircraft,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said in her opening statement at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on oversight of the agency. “These stories are particularly damaging for the leadership of FAA’s safety oversight.”
Since two crashes, in March and October, of Boeing’s 737 Max planes killed 346 people, lawmakers and federal investigators have been reviewing potential flaws in the agency’s approval of the plane. The FAA, which took longer than international regulators to ground the plane after the first accident, has come under fire for failing to catch the risks in new software on the Max that contributed to both crashes. The hearing covered a variety of aviation matters, but committee members took a specific interest in new reports of missteps in the Max’s certification.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published an investigation into the FAA’s certification of the Max, which revealed that agency managers made decisions in part based on Boeing’s timing and budget needs.
Citing the Times story, Collins raised concerns over “instances in which FAA managers appeared to be more concerned with Boeing’s production timeline, rather than the safety recommendations of its own engineers.”
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said that the “grave” allegations in the Times “speak to the need for a culture change that rebalances the relationship between regulator and industry.”
FAA officials said they were open to reevaluating the process.
“If there are improvements we need to make, changes we need to make, if there needs to be a different balance in delegation,” said Carl Burleson, the FAA’s deputy acting administrator, “we are certainly willing and ready to take those recommendations.”
Committee members questioned the decision to leave pilots largely in the dark about the existence of MCAS, an automated system designed to help avoid stalls that played a role in the two crashes.
Ali Bahrami, the FAA’s head of safety, acknowledged the agency could have done more to inform pilots about MCAS.
“We should have included more description in the computer-based training in order to explain what MCAS is,” Bahrami said.
But agency officials defended the certification of the Max and the increasing reliance on aircraft manufacturers to help approve their own planes. In 2018, the FAA allowed Boeing to certify 96 percent of its work.
“We have been fully knowledgeable in dealing with the development of that plane,” Burleson said. “It doesn’t mean that each decision we’ve made has always been perfect. But I do believe the fundamental process of how we went about certifying the Max was sound.”
The FAA has been without a permanent administrator for most of the past 18 months. Stephen Dickson, a former Delta Air Lines executive, was confirmed as the next permanent administrator last month despite concerns from Senate Democrats.