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Boeing’s MAX headache mushrooms as attention turns to the FAA

10 16
10.01.2024

The near-catastrophic blowout of a door on an Alaska Airlines jet is resurrecting questions about the Federal Aviation Administration’s oversight of manufacturers like Boeing — including the agency’s decades-old practice of letting company employees certify their aircraft as safe to fly.

But that practice is unlikely to change anytime soon. For one thing, the FAA has been acting at the behest of Congress, which has over time repeatedly ordered the agency to expand its reliance on the private sector to carry out tasks such as plane certifications. And Congress has shown little appetite to do much different — especially considering what it would cost.

Reversing course — requiring the government to completely own the responsibility of overseeing the work of every plane manufacturer and subcontractor — would be a “huge” task for both Congress and the roughly 45,000-employee FAA, said retired Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who chaired the House Transportation Committee from 2019 to last year.

“There's no way we would get a budget that would be adequate to do all of that,” DeFazio said in an interview. “That would require thousands” of people.

For now, many questions remain unanswered about Friday’s accident, in which the paneled-over exit door of a Boeing 737 MAX 9 popped off mid-flight in the skies over Portland, Oregon. Some passengers were forced to cling to each other for safety as iPhones and other debris flew out through the hole.

The questions for investigators include exactly what part of the aviation system — from the door, the bolts, to the inspection process itself — was to blame for the door failure.

But details that have come to light so far have spurred lawmakers’ scrutiny of Boeing and its Kansas-based contractor, Spirit AeroSystems, which had assembled the door panels for delivery to various airlines. And that in turn has some in Congress asking what role the FAA had in ensuring the plane’s safety — just four years after flaws in Boeing’s earlier MAX 8 were implicated in two crashes that killed a total of 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

The MAX 9 that ruptured last week had entered service just a little over two months before the incident. Investigators have not said who inspected the door plug assembly, or if that part of the plane had yet been subject to a cycle of maintenance.

“The FAA has assured me the 737 MAX is safe — last week’s near catastrophe calls that determination into question," Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) said in a statement Tuesday, calling for hearings in the accident. "Pilots have filed safety complaints on these aircraft, many of which had just rolled off the production line,” he added.

Vance said people........

© Politico


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