Report faults ‘culture’ at Boeing for two crashes Women thrive in Northeast U.S., languish across South
House committee finds Boeing, FAA failed public
A “culture of concealment” at Boeing and “grossly insufficient” federal oversight of the 737 Max contributed to two of the jets crashing within months of each other, killing 346 people, according to a report released Friday by House Democrats.
The report, based on internal company documents, testimony from whistleblowers and public hearings, sets up a push in coming weeks to overhaul how the Federal Aviation Administration ensures the safety of new aircraft designs.
The report concisely sets forth half a dozen ways in which the leaders of the House Transportation Committee have concluded that Boeing and the FAA both failed the public.
Reps. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and Rick Larsen, D-Wa., have said for months that the oversight system for airplane safety is badly broken. They will use the findings to help bolster their case that significant reform is needed to strengthen the government’s hand in dealing with Boeing, one of the nation’s biggest companies.
The report concludes that the FAA’s initial certification review of the plane was “grossly insufficient,” and the agency “failed in its duty” to both uncover critical safety problems and make sure Boeing fixed them.
“The combination of these problems doomed the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights,” the report found.
The FAA declined to address the findings, but said it is open to outside recommendations.
“Today’s unprecedented U.S. safety record was built on the willingness of aviation professionals to embrace hard lessons and to seek continuous improvement,” the agency said in a statement. “While the FAA’s certification processes are well-established and have consistently produced safe aircraft designs, we are a learning agency and welcome the scrutiny.”
Boeing said in a statement that the company’s thoughts were with the crash victims’ families in the lead up to the anniversary and that it would review the report.
Vermont is the best state for basic gender equality and Maryland for female leadership, according to a Bloomberg analysis of pay and power nationwide. Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama were among the worst for American women.
The annual Bloomberg analysis has measured factors such as labor-force participation, education, political representation, health care and corporate leadership since 2016. Even with gains, only a handful of states scored better than 80 points on the 0 to 100 scale, the data showed. Democrat-controlled states were best for women, and Republican states were the worst.
“Looking at states that are doing well across the board, women are doing better,” said Nicole Mason, CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “They have higher earnings, there are more women represented in the state legislature, and there are more women in positions of power.”
The latest index was released ahead of International Women’s Day on Sunday.
At the recent rate of gains, however, gender parity would take many more decades. The institute released data on Thursday estimating that at current rates of improvement, women won’t gain parity in Congress until 2108. Women, who make up about half the workforce and half the population, hold about a quarter of management jobs and only about 5% of CEO jobs. The pay gap has been steady for more than a decade, with women earning about 80 cents for every dollar a man makes.
“‘Glacial’ is the right word to use when we think about women’s progress in the U.S.,” Mason said.
In aggregate, many factors measured in the survey are improving. Only about 14% of women lived in poverty in the U.S. in the 2020 index compared with 17% in 2016. Women held 29% of state legislature seats in 2019, up from 24% in 2015. A third of women 25 and older had at least a bachelor’s degree versus 30% in the 2016 ranking.
Vermont, the home state of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, is a bright spot for most of those measures.