For more than six decades, the Federal Aviation Administration has relied on employees of airplane manufacturers to do government-required safety inspections as planes are being designed or assembled. But critics say the system, dubbed the \u201cdesignee program,\u201d is too cozy as company employees do work for an agency charged with keeping the skies safe while being paid by an industry that the FAA is regulating. \u201cThere is a potential conflict of interest,\u201d said Todd Curtis, a former Boeing Co. safety engineer and creator of airsafe.com, a website that focuses on airline safety. \u201cThey (the FAA) don\u2019t have the money to do all of the oversight.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a question of being practical.\u201d The FAA\u2019s oversight duties are coming under greater scrutiny after deadly crashes involving Boeing 737 Max jets operated by airlines in Ethiopia and Indonesia, killing a total of 346 people. The US was nearly alone in allowing the planes to keep flying until it relented on Wednesday after getting satellite evidence showing the crashes may be linked. The FAA concedes that it doesn\u2019t have resources to keep up with a growing aviation industry, and experts say it lacks the personnel to inspect every component, especially those made in other countries. But the agency says the programme\u2019s results speak for themselves. The US has the safest skies in the world. Until April of last year, U.S. passenger airlines had not had a fatality since 2009, while carrying several billion passengers.<\/p>\n
But safety experts say it\u2019s time to look into the agency\u2019s relationship with Boeing. The FAA\u2019s ties to the company were revealed when Boeing and the agency released similar messages shortly after the Indonesian airliner crashed in October and again this week, when the FAA announced that Boeing would upgrade the Max\u2019s flight-control software, said Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general. With the messages, the FAA \u201crevealed that they were just parroting what Boeing told them,\u201d she said. The agency needs more people with technical skills to adequately monitor a company that makes machines as sophisticated as today\u2019s jets, she said, contending that it didn\u2019t understand the Max\u2019s flight-control computer programme. \u201cThe FAA readily states they don\u2019t understand the 4 million lines of code and the 150 computers,\u201d Schiavo said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat they do is see that Boeing followed the process, they checked the FAA boxes. The public thinks the FAA has more involvement.\u201d Indeed, the agency\u2019s own website says that employees of manufacturers can approve design changes and aircraft repairs. \u201cUsing designees for routine certification tasks allows the FAA to focus its limited resources on safety critical certification issues,\u201d it says. Congress will examine the relationship between Boeing and the FAA. Rep. Peter A.<\/p>\n
DeFazio (D-Ore.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said he would hold hearings on the FAA\u2019s process for approving the planes. The agency\u2019s practice of delegating certification processes has come under scrutiny before. In a 1993 report, the Government Accountability Office warned that the FAA was falling behind the industry in technical competence because of lack of training and delegation of tasks to the manufacturers. The report said 95 percent of certification work for the Boeing 747-400 jetliner was delegated to the manufacturer in 1989. By comparison, 70 to 75 percent of that work was done by the FAA in the early 1980s, the report said. In a separate report in 2005, the GAO said the FAA had no requirements for evaluating its designated certification workers within the industry.<\/p>\n
It also had incomplete records about safety violations that occurred during the inspection process. FAA designees have also run afoul of the law. Last February, Edward Carl Fernandez, an FAA-designated representative in Florida, pleaded guilty to falsely certifying the airworthiness of aviation parts. Between 2010 and 2013, prosecutors said, Fernandez would sign off on parts from an aviation repair company in exchange for bribes.<\/p>\n
Checks by the employees, who are paid by the airplane makers, are reviewed by government inspectors. In a 2017 video, FAA Assistant Administrator Peggy Gilligan said the agency had 6,000 engineers and aircraft inspectors overseeing 7,500 designees in aircraft certification and flight standards. Another 4,000 designees are working at FAA-approved companies, like parts suppliers. Curtis, who worked for Boeing from 1991 to 2000, said the system is designed so that company employees defer to the FAA if they find something wrong. Peter Goelz, a former NTSB managing director who now is an aviation safety consultant, said the system has worked well for years.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut at times like this, people start to question it,\u201d he said. He\u2019s not one of them, though, saying that the proof is in the outcome. \u201cWe have had the safest aviation system in the world for a long time,\u201d Goelz said. \u201cThe size of the bureaucracy you would need to move to a completely \u2018gotcha environment\u2019 simply would be unsustainable.\u201d James Hall, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said he thinks the agency may have gotten complacent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For more than six decades, the Federal Aviation Administration has relied on employees of airplane manufacturers to do government-required safety inspections as planes are being designed or assembled. But critics say the system, dubbed the \u201cdesignee program,\u201d is too cozy as company employees do work for an agency charged with keeping the skies safe while being paid by an industry that the FAA is regulating. \u201cThere is a potential conflict of interest,\u201d said Todd Curtis, a former Boeing Co. safety engineer and creator of airsafe.com, a website that focuses on airline safety. \u201cThey (the FAA) don\u2019t have the money to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-aviation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}