Preliminary findings conclude that Boeing “jeopardized the safety of the flying public” in its attempts to get the Boeing 737 Max approved by regulators.
The 13-page report found Boeing’s Max design “was marred by technical design failures, lack of transparency with both regulators and customers”.
According to the report, in 2011 the manufacturer was “under tremendous financial pressure” to compete with its rival Airbus’s A320neo aircraft. The speediest solution was to update its 737 fleet rather than develop a new plane. As a result of those pressures, and in order to get the Max certified as quickly as possible, the manufacturer misled and withheld information from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and even “the very existence” of the MCAS anti-stall software system, blamed for the crashes, from pilots.
The congressional committee cited conflicts of interest among Boeing employees who were authorized to perform certification work on behalf of the FAA and said Boeing’s influence over the FAA’s oversight had resulted in FAA management “rejecting safety concerns raised by the agency’s own technical experts at the behest of Boeing”.
The regulator’s oversight was “grossly insufficient” and it “failed in its duty” to both uncover critical problems and make sure Boeing fixed them, the committee found. “The combination of these problems doomed the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights,” the report concluded.
In one example of regulatory failure the committee reported that following the crash of a Lion Air Max, the FAA learned that Boeing had failed to fix an inoperable alert on an estimated 80% of the 737 Max fleet “and decided not to inform the FAA or its customers about the non-functioning alert for more than 14 months, which should have raised concerns about Boeing’s transparency with the FAA”.
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