Report blames Boeing, FAA for 737 issues
Boeing failed to adequately explain to regulators a new automated system that contributed to two crashes of the 737 Max, and the Federal Aviation Administration lacked the capability to effectively analyze much of what Boeing did share about the new plane.
Those are among the findings in a damning report released Friday by a multiagency task force that the FAA convened to scrutinize the Max’s certification process after the second plane crashed in March.
The review scrutinized the FAA’s certification of the Max’s flight control system, including the new automated system, MCAS, that played a role in both crashes, in Indonesia last October and in Ethiopia in March.
In each crash, pilots struggled as a single damaged sensor sent the plane into an irrecoverable nose-dive within minutes of takeoff.
A total of 346 people were killed in the crashes, which prompted regulators around the world to ground the Max.
The report found that while the FAA had been made aware of MCAS, “the information and discussions about MCAS were so fragmented and were delivered to disconnected groups” that it “was difficult to recognize the impacts and implications of this system.”
The task force said it believed that if FAA technical staff had been fully aware of the details of MCAS, the agency would probably have required additional scrutiny of the system that might have identified its flaws.
Boeing is now updating the system to make it less powerful, and it says it will install a modified version when the Max, which is still grounded, returns to service.
The FAA’s administrator, Steve Dickson, said in a statement that he would “review every recommendation and take appropriate action.”
“We welcome this scrutiny and are confident that our openness to these efforts will further bolster aviation safety worldwide,” he added.
In a statement, the Boeing spokesman Gordon Johndroe said “safety is a core value for everyone at Boeing,” and that the company “is committed to working with the FAA in reviewing the recommendations and helping to continuously improve the process and approach used to validate and certify airplanes going forward.”
A broad theme of the report is that the FAA was too focused on the specifics of the new system and did not put sufficient effort into understanding its overall impact on the plane. In certification documents that Boeing submitted to the FAA, MCAS was not evaluated as “a complete and integrated function” on the new plane.
The report also said Boeing had failed to inform the FAA as the design of MCAS changed during the plane’s development. A New York Times investigation revealed that the system changed dramatically during that process, making MCAS riskier and more powerful, and that key FAA officials were unaware of major changes to the system.
The task force said the certification documents that Boeing provided to the FAA “were not updated during the certification program to reflect the changes” made to MCAS.
It added that two critical documents that describe the potential dangers of a system like MCAS, the system safety assessment and the functional hazard assessment, “were not consistently updated.”