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The NY Times wrote that after “intense lobbying to Congress by industry” resulted in the FAA delegating more authority to manufacturers in 2005, an approach that FAA officials believed would streamline approvals, some staff became concerned that they were no longer able to track what was happening inside Boeing. According to the Times, interviews with over a dozen current and former FAA and Boeing employees have shown that regulators “never independently assessed the risks of the dangerous software known as MCAS [Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System] when they approved the plane in 2017.”
During the 737 Max’s development, the NY Times wrote, the FAA assigned two engineers to oversee flight control systems at its Boeing Aviation Safety Oversight Office that other staff say were poorly qualified for the roles. An early version of MCAS cleared a Boeing safety review and the system “didn’t prompt additional scrutiny from the F.A.A. engineers,” two FAA officials told the paper. But the FAA delegated further review of the system to Boeing in 2016 even as it made significant alterations to MCAS—
When company engineers analyzed the change, they figured that the system had not become any riskier, according to two people familiar with Boeing’s discussions on the matter. They assumed that pilots would respond to a malfunction in three seconds, quickly bringing the nose of the plane back up. In their view, any problems would be less dangerous at low speeds.
So the company never submitted an updated safety assessment of those changes to the agency. In several briefings in 2016, an F.A.A. test pilot learned the details of the system from Boeing. But the two F.A.A. engineers didn’t understand that MCAS could move the tail as much as 2.5 degrees, according to two people familiar with their thinking.
According to the Times, the FAA assumed the “system was insignificant” and further allowed Boeing to remove mentions of it from pilots’ manuals; the FAA “did not mention the software in 30 pages of detailed descriptions noting differences between the Max and the previous iteration of the 737.”
This had been going on for decades, it is not fair to point the finger solely at Trump he wasn't in office till Jan 2017, Congress in 2017 approved even further delegating of FAA authority.to manufacturers....
regards
Last edited by JohnHarris; 20/01/21 04:48 PM.
