Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg remains confident in U.S. aircraft safety certification despite congressional criticism of the system’s partial dependence on the planemaker’s own employees after two deadly crashes of a new airliner.
The Federal Aviation Administration’s delegation of some authority to individuals and companies with specialized knowledge of airliner equipment and operations is a “high-integrity process,” Muilenburg said at a Wednesday conference in New York. “It’s a way for the FAA to exercise its independent role, its regulatory role, as it should but also tap into the deep technical expertise in our company.”
The practice, which is also used by regulators and planemakers worldwide, has come under scrutiny after the grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX model following the crashes, which occurred in less than five months and killed more than 300 people. Lawmakers grilled regulators in two separate hearings, and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao ordered a review of the jetliner’s initial certification for commercial flights.
Currently, 79 organizations are authorized to handle some certification duties for the FAA, though the agency retains the right to intervene directly at any time. Its personnel are always involved in level-of-safety determinations and establishment of rules for special situations, acting FAA Administrator Daniel Elwell has said. Despite concerns about the practice, it has coincided with a period of significant improvements in air safety.
“You just need to look at the results over the last 20 years with implementation of this approach,” Muilenburg said Wednesday. “We’ve seen a 95% reduction in fatal accidents in the aviation sector. That’s across the 90 million flights in the U.S. over the last 20 years. It is the safest form of transportation in the world, and I give a lot of credit for that to the regulatory structure that the FAA has put in place.”
While certification of the 737 MAX, the latest iteration of a model in service for 50 years, was less intense than with a brand new airplane, it still took five years from Boeing’s first permit application to final certification in March 2017. That included 297 flight tests, some of which involved the anti-stall software linked to the crashes.
In the first crash, in Indonesia in October, a malfunctioning sensor on a 737 MAX 8 fed incorrect data on the airliner’s ascent vector to the computer system, which attempted to lower the angle at which it was ascending to avoid a stall, officials said. That prompted a struggle between the new computer software, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, and the pilot, who ultimately lost control of the aircraft.
U.S. regulators ordered airlines to update operations manuals on the handling of such issues and Boeing is developing a software patch under FAA oversight. The fact that it hadn’t been completed was part of what prompted the high level of concern after the second crash, which occurred outside the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.
It wasn’t until data transmitted to satellites from the flight showed climbs and descents during takeoff, similar to those before the Indonesia crash, that the FAA ordered carriers to park the planes. Regulators in the European Union, China, and Canada had already done so.
“We are taking all actions necessary to make sure that accidents like those two accidents that have occurred never happened again,” Muilenburg said Wednesday. “We know more broadly that the public’s confidence has been hurt by these accidents and that we have work to do to earn and re-earn the trust of the flying public and we will do that.”
Boeing shares have fallen 17% to $348.13 since the second crash, which forced the planemaker to slow production and delivery of the MAX, the best-selling model in its history. The S&P 500 gained roughly 2% in the same period.
