Boeing had too much sway in vetting jets

Bloomberg

FAA employees warned as early as seven years ago that Boeing Co. had too much sway over safety approvals of new aircraft, prompting an investigation by Department of Transportation auditors who confirmed the agency hadn’t done enough to “hold Boeing accountable.”
The 2012 investigation also found that discord over Boeing’s treatment had created a “negative work environment” among Federal Aviation Administration employees who approve new and modified aircraft designs, with many of them saying they’d faced retaliation for speaking up. Their concerns pre-dated the 737 Max development.
A person familiar with the 737 Max said the Transportation Department’s Inspector General was examining the plane’s design certification before the second of two deadly crashes of the almost brand-new aircraft. Earlier, Ethiopia’s transport minister said flight-data recorders show “clear similarities” between the crashes of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10 and Lion Air Flight 610 last October.
Shares of the Chicago-based planemaker fell early on Monday after Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg and FAA officials were forced to defend the quality of testing of the new aircraft, and the Wall Street Journal reported on a grand jury probe. The stock was trading at $371.99 in pre-market US trading — down 1.8 percent from, and below any closing price since the Ethiopian Airlines disaster.
A Seattle Times investigation found that the US regulator delegated much of the safety assessment to Boeing and that the company in turn delivered an analysis with crucial flaws.
Separately, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., issued a broad subpoena dated March 11 to at least one person involved in the development process of the
737 Max jets, the Wall Street Journal reported.
In recent years, the FAA has shifted more authority over the approval of new aircraft to the manufacturer itself, even allowing Boeing to choose many of the personnel who oversee tests and vouch for safety.
Just in the past few months, Congress expanded the outsourcing arrangement even further.
“It raises for me the question of whether agency is properly fun-ded, properly staffed and whet-her there has been enough inde- pendent oversight,” said Jim Hall, who was chairman of National Transportation Safety Board from 1994 to 2001 and is now an aviation-safety consultant.
The FAA has let technical experts at aircraft makers act as its representatives to perform certain tests and approve some parts for decades. The FAA expanded the scope of that program in 2005 to address concerns about adequately keeping pace with its workload. Known as Organization Designation Authorization, or ODA, it let Boeing and other manufacturers choose the employees who approve design work on the agency’s behalf.
Previously, the FAA approved each appointment. Under the new approach, which was fully implemented in 2009, the ODA representatives are still under US legal requirements and the FAA has the authority to oversee them and request that their management be changed.

OUTSOURCING SAFETY
At least a portion of the flight-control software suspected in the 737 Max crashes was certified by one or more Boeing employees who worked in the outsourcing arrangement, according to one person familiar with the work who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the inspector general’s latest inquiry. The watchdog is trying to assess whether the FAA used appropriate design standards and engineering analysis in approving the 737 Max’s anti-stall system, the newspaper said. Both Boeing and the Transportation Department declined to comment about that inquiry.
In a statement, the agency said its “aircraft certification processes are well established and have consistently produced safe aircraft designs,” adding that the “737 Max certification program followed the FAA’s standard certification process.”
The Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed minutes after it took off from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. The accident prompted most of the world to ground Boeing’s 737 Max 8 aircraft on safety concerns, coming on the heels of the October crash of a Max 8 operated by Indonesia’s Lion Air that killed 189 people. Much of the attention focused on a flight-control system that can automatically push a plane into a catastrophic nose dive if it malfunctions and pilots don’t react properly.
In one of the most detailed descriptions yet of the relationship between Boeing and the FAA during the 737 Max’s certification, the Seattle Times quoted unnamed engineers who said the planemaker had understated the power of the flight-control software in a System Safety Analysis submitted to the FAA. The newspaper said the analysis also failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded — in essence, gradually ratcheting the horizontal stabilizer into a dive position.
Boeing told the newspaper in a statement that the FAA had reviewed the company’s data and concluded the aircraft “met all certification and regulatory requirements.” The company, which is based in Chicago but designs and builds commercial jets in the Seattle area, said there are “some significant mischaracterizations” in the engineers’ comments.

Black box shows similarities in Lion Air, Ethiopian crashes
Bloomberg

The Ethiopian Air Boeing 737 Max crash had similarities to the Lion Air plane that went down off the coast of Indonesia about five months ago, the nation’s transport minister said, as scrutiny of one of the aircraft’s flight control systems continued to build.
A preliminary study of the flight data recorders show “clear similarities between Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 and Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610,” Dagmawit Moges said at a press conference in Addis Ababa. The findings will be subject to further investigation, and a preliminary report will be released within 30 days, she said.
The Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed March 10 minutes after it took off from Ethiopia’s capital, killing all 157 people on board. The accident prompted most of the world to ground Boeing Co.’s 737 Max 8 aircraft on safety concerns. Much of the attention focused on a specific flight-control system known as MCAS that may have thwarted pilots’ efforts to keep the plane from falling into a catastrophic nose dive.
In one of the most detailed descriptions yet of the relationship between Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration during the 737 Max’s certification process, the Seattle Times reported that the US regulator delegated much of the safety assessment to Boeing and that the analysis the planemaker in turn delivered to the authorities had crucial flaws.