WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 11: FAA ADMINISTRATOR Stephen M. Dickson, Earl Lawerence and Matt Kiefer … [+]
FAA Administrator Steven Dickson faced a barrage of accusations at a House hearing Wednesday that the agency failed to act on a former Boeing manager’s warnings of problems with the production of the 737 MAX and a safety assessment made after the crash of Lion Air Flight 610.
Ed Pierson, a retired senior manager at the Boeing 737 factory in Renton, told the House transportation committee that in 2018, the plant was in “chaos” as it ramped up production of the new version of Boeing’s flagship plane, with work being done out of order and employees fatigued from long hours. He said concerns he expressed to management about quality issues were brushed aside, including a request to temporarily shut down the line.
Pierson alleged that the FAA has failed to adequately investigate factory conditions, stating that the faults with angle of attack sensors that contributed to the crash of two 737 MAX planes could be linked to problems at the plant.
Dickson said there was an ongoing investigation into Pierson’s allegations at the 737 factory.
At a House hearing in October, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said the production manager had contacted him directly, and that Boeing had investigated his concerns and added additional quality controls.
The Transportation committee also shared an internal FAA risk assessment made after the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 that estimated that without design changes, the 737 MAX could be expected to have 15 fatal crashes over the lifetime of the fleet. That would amount to one crash every two to three years.
“The FAA rolled the dice on the safety of the traveling public and let the 737 MAX continue to fly,” said the committee chairman, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.).
Courtesy of House Transportation Committee
Dickson and Earl Lawrence, FAA’s head of aircraft certification, testified that the evaluation was completed after FAA had already issued an emergency directive to airlines instructing pilots of procedures they could use to manually counter a misactivation of MCAS, a flight control system new to the 737 MAX that had incorrectly pushed the nose of the airplane down, precipitating a fatal dive, because a malfunctioning angle of attack sensor led the system to believe the plane was in danger of an aerodynamic stall.
They said the risk assessment informed how long the agency decided to give Boeing to redesign MCAS, and they pushed back against assertions by lawmakers that it alone was evidence that the 737 MAX should have been grounded.
Dickson said the risk assessment was one of a number of tools to aid in decision making. “This is just one aspect of trying to put rigor around something that would otherwise be a subjective decision.”
In retrospect, Dickson conceded under questioning, “the decision didn’t achieve the result we wanted it to achieve.”
Given the steps that still need to be completed, the agency will not approve the 737 MAX to return to service by the end of the year, as Boeing had hoped, Dickson confirmed.
