FAA pushing to become more industry-friendly
WASHINGTON» The Federal Aviation Administration’s deferential, industryfriendly approach to oversight allowed Boeing to submit documentation that obscured the dangers of its 737 Max, which was involved in two deadly crashes, documents, interviews and the findings of investigations show.
However, instead of trying to reclaim its oversight powers after the deaths of 346 people over the past year, the FAA has been pressing ahead with plans to further reduce its hands-on oversight of aviation safety, current and former officials said.
The FAA has been pushing for changes intended to speed approval on critical safety questions and remake regulations using “voluntary consensus standards,” interviews and documents show. That could result in outsourcing policymaking on airplane safety to industry groups outside the public’s view, experts said.
FAA leaders say their approach is based on the premise that companies such as Boeing, and not regulators wielding the stick of enforcement, are best placed to guarantee safety. Rather than focusing on the nitty-gritty details of verifying Boeing’s claims that its airplanes are sound, FAA leaders say the agency should be doing more to make sure companies have their own formal systems in place for managing safety — and overseeing those systems to make sure they are working as promised.
Critics inside and outside government say the FAA’s oversight system, which relies heavily on a structure known as Organization Designation Authorization (ODA), presents a foxguarding-the-henhouse scenario, arguing that the FAA’s history of delegating far-reaching oversight powers to Boeing essentially gave the company an opportunity to cut corners on safety, with deadly consequences. An internal Department of Transportation watchdog has repeatedly reported shortcomings in the FAA’s oversight of its own oversight system.
Boeing, in a statement to The Washington Post, said “the history of commercial airplane development from the 707 to today shows that delegated authority from the FAA has improved the
safety of commercial air travel. Even with steadily increasing traffic, the accident rate has consistently decreased.”
FAA officials have repeatedly defended the agency’s delegation of authority to Boeing, saying the system has helped produce an extraordinary U.S. safety record.
Following recommendations for improvements from U.S. and international safety experts, Administrator Steve Dickson earlier this month said, “We welcome this scrutiny and are confident that our openness to these efforts will further bolster aviation safety worldwide.”
The FAA gives Boeing employees the job of finding whether the company has met minimum FAA safety standards for its airplanes.
But the agency often does not receive the information it would need from Boeing to make many crucial judgments about safety, a group of U.S. and international aviation safety experts said earlier this month. And in many cases, agency officials don’t ask for it, current and former FAA officials said.
Key agency officials lacked critical information about the automated feature on the 737 Max that investigators say contributed to two crashes within five months, one in Indonesia exactly a year ago and one in Ethiopia, according to the group, which was convened by the FAA and led by Christopher Hart, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
The feature, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, repeatedly engaged based on faulty data from a single sensor that investigators say had probably been poorly repaired.
The noses of both planes were pushed down over and over again as the pilots struggled unsuccessfully to regain control.
Under its oversight system, the FAA failed to catch several major safety breaches, according to Indonesian investigators who on Friday issued their final report on the Oct. 29 Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people.
The investigation concluded that the pilots’ efforts to save the plane were hampered by the lack of a warning message that would show when two crucial sensors disagreed. That warning message was a standard feature of older 737s and was supposed to work on the Max, but was mistakenly only activated as part of an optional upgrade, according to the investigators.
“The software not having the intended functionality was not detected by Boeing nor the FAA during development and certification of the 737-8 Max,” the investigators wrote.
The FAA group that oversees Boeing, known as the Boeing Aviation Safety Oversight Office, has a staff of 45 people, drastically outnumbered by the 1,500 Boeing employees that were supposed to be working on the FAA’s behalf as part of the oversight system, according to the Hart report.
But that inequality of resources was by design, part of a years-long effort, in some cases directed by Congress, to give many of the FAA’s oversight responsibilities to Boeing itself. Supporters cited the company’s deep technical expertise, and complaints of bureaucratic FAA slowdowns, as justification for the shift toward industry.