Trump faces criticism over FAA politics

Administration perceived as dragging feet on grounding Boeing jet after crashes

WASHINGTON — On the third day after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed outside Addis Ababa, the Trump administration’s senior air safety official was still defending the plane.

Acting Federal Aviation Administrator Daniel Elwell, a former Air Force command pilot and American Airlines captain, was reassuring the House chairman who oversees aviation safety about the soundness of the jet, even though that same model had crashed in Indonesia four months earlier.

“He still had confidence in the plane,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., chairman of the House Transportation committee. DeFazio said Elwell agreed to return that afternoon to address growing concerns. “Then they went dark.”

In that time, Canada’s transportation minister announced that new satellite tracking data showed enough similarities between the two crashes to ground the aircraft, following numerous other

countries that had already made the decision. That left the U.S. as a glaring holdout.

Finally, at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, word came from President Donald Trump that the U.S., too, would ground the planes.

“I didn’t want to take any chances,” Trump said.

It was extraordinary for a president to intervene in matters typically left to the FAA or the Department of Transportation. Asked if President Barack Obama was ever directly involved in a decision whether to ground planes or issue urgent safety mandates during his tenure, Obama transportation secretary Anthony Foxx said “No, never, not one time.”

In public and in private, Trump presented himself as a key arbiter in deciding whether the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 planes would be able to keep flying, according to White House and transportation officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Rather than simply being briefed on the FAA’s findings in the days after the crash, Trump played an active role, holding daily phone calls with Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg and other stakeholders and offering his thoughts about the aviation industry. Asked by reporters about the decision to ground the plane, Trump left the impression that he had taken the lead, saying it was a “very tough decision.”

But in the days that followed, as Trump faced criticism about whether his administration acted too slowly and whether he should have been so intimately involved, the White House sought to shift attention back to the aviation agency.

A senior White House official said the FAA had repeatedly told the president in phone calls that there was no reason to ground the planes and that Boeing had a record for being safe. This official said the FAA showed the president how many Boeing planes were in the sky, told him the particular model had been flying for years and urged against a quick grounding.

An FAA spokesman declined to discuss what was communicated to the president. But agency officials offered various versions of this statement to the public as well as others in government: “all available data … shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft.”

The disagreement offers a window into the broader dysfunction that can result when the highly technical realm of crash investigations is made political.

After Trump jumped in, some of the signature features of his presidency washed over the process. The typically plodding, data-driven forensic work of figuring out what caused an airplane to fall from the sky has given way to attention-grabbing tweets, administration infighting, and questions of government competence, critics said.

At the same time, critics said FAA officials were more stubborn than valiant in their initial refusal to act, and that they were too deferential to Boeing.

“When we say we have no basis to ground the aircraft, we have no basis to ground the aircraft,” one FAA official said Tuesday, when the European Union and others were breaking with the United States.

“You had data. You had 350 dead bodies in four months,” countered a former FAA official.

It’s a remarkable situation for the FAA — and a test of the agency’s standing at a time when commercial flight in the United States is historically safe.

Joseph LoVecchio, a retired airline pilot with 31 years of experience flying major carriers and jets including the Boeing 737, said the FAA has struggled to balance its dual role as regulator and promoter of aviation.

“They are both the salesman as well as the cop, and that has always been an issue,” LoVecchio said.

He said the FAA’s oversight of Boeing’s training and documentation for a key automation feature was flawed. That feature has been blamed, in part, for the crash of the Boeing 737 Max 8 in Indonesia in October.

“Of all the years of building aircraft and certifying them, how can something like that slip through the cracks? That was a failure of leadership,” LoVecchio said.

But Ray LaHood, a former GOP congressman from Peoria, Ill., who also served as a transportation secretary under Obama, emphasized that the vast majority of FAA staff are career employees focused on ensuring the U.S. aviation system is as safe as possible.

Once potential problems with the planes are fixed, “I think this will be a small little blip on the total reputation of the agency,” he said.