FAA’s close ties to Boeing questioned after 2 deadly crashes
Oversight duties are coming under greater scrutiny
For more than six decades, the Federal Aviation Administration has relied on employees of airplane manufacturers to do government-required safety inspections as planes are being designed or assembled.
But critics say the system, dubbed the “designee program,” is too cozy as company employees do work for an agency charged with keeping the skies safe while being paid by an industry that the FAA is regulating.
“There is a potential conflict of interest,” said Todd Curtis, a former Boeing Co. safety engineer and creator of airsafe.com, a website that focuses on airline safety. “They (the FAA) don’t have the money to do all of the oversight. It’s a question of being practical.”
The FAA’s oversight duties are coming under greater scrutiny after deadly crashes involving Boeing 737 Max jets operated by airlines in Ethiopia and Indonesia, killing a total of 346 people. The U.S. was nearly alone in allowing the planes to keep flying until it relented on Wednesday after getting satellite evidence showing the crashes may be linked.
The FAA concedes that it doesn’t have resources to keep up with a growing aviation industry, and experts say it lacks the personnel to inspect every component, especially those made in other countries. But the agency says the designee program’s results speak for themselves. The U.S. has the safest skies in the world. Until April of last year, U.S. passenger airlines had not had a fatality since 2009, while carrying several billion passengers.
But safety experts say it’s time to look into the agency’s relationship with Boeing, based in Chicago. The FAA’s ties to the company were revealed when Boeing and the agency released similar messages shortly after the Indonesian airliner crashed in October and again this week, when the FAA announced that Boeing would upgrade the Max’s flightcontrol software, said Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general.
With the messages, the FAA “revealed that they were just parroting what Boeing told them,” she said.
The agency needs more people with technical skills to adequately monitor a company that makes machines as sophisticated as today’s jets, she said, contending that it didn’t understand the Max’s flightcontrol computer program.
“The FAA readily states they don’t understand the 4 million lines of code and the 150 computers,” Schiavo said. “What they do is see that Boeing followed the process, they checked the FAA boxes. The public thinks the FAA has more involvement.”
Indeed, the agency’s own website says that employees of manufacturers can approve design changes and aircraft repairs. “Using designees for routine certification tasks allows the FAA to focus its limited resources on safety critical certification issues,” it says.
A Boeing spokesman said company employees get regular training and oversight from the FAA.
“The long-standing collaborative engagement between the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing, its customers and industry partners has created the safest transportation system in the world,” Boeing spokesman Daniel Curran said in an email.
The FAA requirements in the designee program “ensure that Boeing employees serving in this capacity act independently on behalf of the FAA,” he said.
Congress will examine the relationship between Boeing and the FAA. Rep. Peter A. DeFazio, D-Ore., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said he would hold hearings on the FAA’s process for approving the planes.
Peter Goelz, a former NTSB managing director who now is an aviation safety consultant, said the system has worked well for years. “But at times like this, people start to question it,” he said.
He’s not one of them, though, saying that the proof is in the outcome. “We have had the safest aviation system in the world for a long time,” Goelz said. “The size of the bureaucracy you would need to move to a completely `gotcha environment’ simply would be unsustainable.”
James Hall, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said he thinks the agency may have gotten complacent.
“We have a good system,” said Hall, the former NTSB chairman, “and sometimes people go to sleep when things are going well. It’s time to wake up.”