Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao on Tuesday asked her department’s inspector general to review how Boeing’s 737 MAX, the best-selling plane whose two recent crashes killed more than 300 people, obtained Federal Aviation Administration approval for commercial flights.
“Safety is the top priority of the department, and all of us are saddened by the fatalities resulting form the recent accidents,” Chao said in a memo to Inspector General Calvin Scovel. Her memo demanded a detailed factual timeline of events leading to airworthiness certification for the aircraft, the latest version of an airline industry workhorse.
The audit would “help inform the department’s decision-making,” she said, and “assist the FAA in ensuring that its safety procedures are implemented effectively.”
Chao’s memo was sent just days after aviation safety officials in Canada and the U.S. joined their international counterparts in grounding the 737 MAX amid scrutiny of crashes on March 10 in Ethiopia and Oct. 29 in Indonesia. While Chicago-based Boeing has maintained the airliner is safe, it ultimately backed the FAA’s decision to sideline the plane.
“We know lives depend on the work we do,” CEO Dennis Muilenburg said Monday. “We’ll keep striving to earn and keep the trust people have placed in Boeing.”
In the Indonesian crash, a malfunctioning sensor on a 737-8 MAX fed incorrect data on the airliner’s ascent vector to a computer system that attempted to lower the angle at which it was ascending to avoid a stall, officials said. That prompted a struggle between new computer software — known as a Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS — and the pilot, who ultimately lost control of the aircraft. All 189 people aboard were killed.
U.S. regulators have ordered airlines to update operations manuals on the handling of such issues and Boeing is installing a mandated software patch by April. The fact that the patch hadn’t been completed was part of what prompted the high level of concern after the Ethiopian crash, which occurred outside the capital of Addis Ababa, killing all of the plane’s 157 occupants.
Boeing has won more than 4,600 orders for the single-aisle jetliner and was working to ramp production up to 57 a month prior to the Ethiopian crash, which would have netted a potential $30 billion in sales this year, according to Fitch Ratings, a firm that evaluates corporate debt.
While the grounding forced North American airlines to hurriedly rearrange their schedules to cover the grounded plane, the impact was far less severe than it would have been with a more established model. Only 67 of the aircraft, which Boeing began delivering in 2017, are flown in the U.S., and there are fewer than 400 in use worldwide. Air Canada, which was expecting six deliveries in March and April, said Tuesday it has modified its schedule through April 30 to accommodate 98 percent of its previously planned flights.
Boeing’s Muilenburg, who assured President Trump personally of the aircraft’s reliability prior to its grounding, promised this week that his company “is committed to making safe airplanes even safer,” citing the software update.
In the meantime, committees with aviation oversight authority in the Democrat-controlled House and the Republican-led Senate have both promised hearings on the crashes, a move supported by James Hall, who chaired the independent National Transportation Safety Board from 1994 to 2001.
Boeing should have recommended sidelining the MAX after the Indonesian crash, he told the Washington Examiner. That the plane not only kept flying but the U.S. was the last country to ground it shows “possible gaps at the FAA and their knowledge and ability, with their funding and staffing, to oversee a company the size of Boeing,” he said.
