Boeing (BA) 737 Deception Alleged in Scathing House Report on Max Crashes - Bloomberg

Boeing (BA) 737 Deception Alleged in Scathing House Report on Max Crashes - Bloomberg

Boeing Deception Alleged in Scathing
House Report on Max Crashes

By Alan Levin

September 16, 2020, 10:00 AM GMT+1

Sweeping failures by Boeing Co. engineers, deception by the
company and significant errors in government oversight led to the two fatal
crashes of the 737 Max, congressional investigators have concluded.

A 245-page report issued Wednesday provides the most
scathing account so far of the miscalculations that led to 346 deaths, the
grounding of Boeing’s best-selling jet and billions of dollars in losses for
the manufacturing giant.

“The
Max crashes were not the result of a singular failure, technical mistake or
mismanaged event,” the report by the House Transportation and Infrastructure
Committee said. “They were the horrific culmination of a series of faulty
technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency on the part
of Boeing’s management and grossly insufficient oversight by the” Federal
Aviation Administration.

The report -- the result of five investigative hearings, a
review of about 600,000 pages of documents, interviews with top Boeing and FAA
officials and information provided by whistle-blowers -- makes the case for
broad changes in the FAA’s oversight of the aircraft industry.

It offers a more searing version of events than the
sometimes technical language in previous crash reports and investigations,
including one conducted by the Transportation Department’s Inspector General.

The conclusions were drawn by the majority staff under
committee Chairman Peter DeFazio. The report cites five main reasons for the crashes:

DeFazio said he found it “mind boggling” that Boeing and FAA
officials concluded, according to the report, that the plane’s design had
complied with regulations in spite of the crashes.

“The problem is it was compliant and not safe -- and people
died,” he said. “Obviously, the system is inadequate.”

Lawmakers are drafting legislation designed to reform how
the FAA oversees companies such as Boeing and reviews aircraft designs. The
Senate Commerce Committee plans to vote on a bipartisan bill on Wednesday.
DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, hasn’t yet unveiled his legislation.

Republican leaders on the House committee took issue with
the report’s findings, saying they represented partisan overreach that went
beyond what other reviews have found.

“Expert recommendations have already led to changes and
reforms, with more to come,” said a joint statement from Sam Graves of Missouri
and Garret Graves of Louisiana. “These recommendations -- not a partisan
investigative report -- should serve as the basis for Congressional action.”

Boeing said in a statement it had cooperated with the
committee’s investigation and had taken steps at the company to improve safety.

“We have learned many hard lessons as a company from the
accidents of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Flight 302, and from the
mistakes we have made,” the company said. “Change is always hard and requires
daily commitment, but we as a company are dedicated to doing the work.”

The FAA said in a statement late Tuesday night that it was
committed to working with the committee to make improvements. “We are already
undertaking important initiatives based on what we have learned from our own
internal reviews as well as independent reviews of the Lion Air and Ethiopian
Airlines accidents,” the agency said in the statement.

But tensions between the committee staff and the FAA were
clearly evident. Ali Bahrami, who oversees safety at the agency, came under
repeated criticism in the report for what the committee called his lack of
awareness of issues surrounding the Max and the accidents. The committee
staffers declined to provide him with questions before the Dec. 5 interview,
which made it difficult for him to recall documents and events, an FAA counsel
warned at the start of the interview, according to a transcript.

While DeFazio and other lawmakers haven’t called for a
permanent grounding of the jet, the father of a woman who died in the Ethiopia
crash said the report raised questions about the plane’s return to service.

“The FAA should immediately halt the recertification process
for the 737 Max in light of this report,” said Michael Stumo, father of Samya
Stumo. He accused Boeing and the FAA of withholding information from the
families of victims in an emailed statement.

The 737 Max was grounded March 13, 2019, three days after
the second crash involving a safety feature on the plane that malfunctioned and
repeatedly sent the planes into a dive toward the ground.

Boeing and regulators
had approved the design under the assumption that flight crews could recognize
and override a malfunction of the system within a few seconds. Even though
the system could have been disabled by flipping two cockpit switches,
pilots on a Lion Air flight departing from Jakarta on Oct. 29, 2018, and an
Ethiopian Airlines plane leaving Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019, became
confused, lost control and crashed.

The feature, known as Maneuvering
Characteristics Augmentation System, was designed to make the Max feel
exactly the same to pilots as the earlier family of 737s known as the Next
Generation. However, the system was triggered erroneously by a single sensor
that failed in both crashes and it continued to push the nose down repeatedly.

The FAA has tentatively approved multiple design changes to
prevent such an accident in the future and the plane could be certified to
resume operations in the fall.

The House report identifies numerous instances in which it
alleges the company should have known that MCAS was potentially dangerous.

For example, a Boeing test pilot during the early
development of the plane in 2012 took more than 10 seconds to respond to an
erroneous MCAS activation, a condition the pilot concluded could be
“catastrophic,” the report said.

“The reaction time was long,” one Boeing employee told
another in an email on Nov. 1, 2012, which was viewed by Bloomberg. The
unidentified employee asked whether the rating of the system’s risks should be
raised, which may have prompted a more thorough safety review.

Those concerns “were not properly addressed” and the company
“did not inform the FAA,” the report said.

Boeing ultimately concluded that flight crews would react
far swifter to an MCAS failure, typically within four seconds.

The report also said the responses by Boeing and the FAA to
the first accident -- warnings to pilots issued in early November 2018 --
weren’t adequate to prevent a second crash.

“Both Boeing and the FAA gambled with the public’s safety in
the aftermath of the Lion Air crash, resulting in the death of 157 more
individuals on Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, less than five months later,” the
report said.

The guidance on how to avoid an accident during an MCAS
failure detailed the symptoms pilots would see and reminded crews how to shut
it off. The committee criticized Boeing and the FAA for not mentioning the
system’s name.

FAA officials have said they debated whether to include MCAS in the directive, but opted not to
because it wasn’t mentioned in pilot flight manuals. Boeing within days
sent additional guidance to airlines on MCAS and how it worked. Details on MCAS
were also widely reported in the news media and internal airline documents
obtained by Bloomberg show that it had been explained to Ethiopian Airlines
pilots before their crash.

‘Undue Pressure’

A key finding involves a long-standing practice -- which was
expanded by Congress several times -- to deputize Boeing employees to act in
behalf of FAA while reviewing aircraft designs.

According to a 2016 survey obtained by the committee, 39% of Boeing’s Authorized Representatives,
senior engineers who conducted reviews for FAA, at times perceived “undue
pressure” on them from management.

One such senior engineer knew that Boeing was delivering
Maxes to customers without a required
alert in 2017 and 2018, yet didn’t notify FAA, the report said. The
lack of such an alert was cited by Indonesian investigators as a factor in the
Lion Air crash.

Both House and Senate legislation is expected to seek
reforms of the so-called delegation system, which the report said is riddled
with “inherent conflicts of interest.”

Boeing opted almost a decade ago to update the 737 to compete
against a similar redesign of the Airbus SE A320 family. It faced intense
pressure to ensure that -- just as Airbus promised -- pilots transferring from
earlier 737 models didn’t need expensive additional simulator training.

Simulator Training

The company had agreed to pay Southwest Airlines Co. $1
million per aircraft if Max pilots had to train in the simulator before
transitioning to the new plane, which could have cost it between $200 million
to $400 million.

The push to avoid
simulator training led to multiple poor decisions by Boeing, the committee
alleged. The manufacturer rejected adding a sophisticated safety system that
might have helped in the accidents at least in part because it would have
required additional training.

The company also deemphasized MCAS to the FAA as a result.
In a 2013 company document, Boeing said it would describe MCAS to the FAA as an
add-on to an existing system. “If we emphasize MCAS is a new function there may
be a greater certification and training impact,” the memo said.

The broad failure to fully explain MCAS was a critical issue
because the system was made more powerful midway through its development, but
many within the FAA didn’t know and the agency delegated the final safety
approvals to the company, the report found.

“The combination of these problems doomed the Lion Air and
Ethiopian Airlines flights,” the report said.