Says FAA Needs To Completely Revamp Its Certification Delegation Program

U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) used a Senate Commerce Committee hearing Tuesday to call for what would amount to an indefinite grounding of Boeing's 737 MAX airplanes.

Blumenthal (pictured) took issue with the FAA's program that delegates some certification tasks to aircraft manufacturers. The program has come under fire because of issues with the MCAS on the 737 MAX, which has been implicated in two accidents involving the airplane.

“The story of Boeing sabotaging rigorous safety scrutiny is chilling to all of us — and more reason to keep the 737 MAX grounded until certification is really and truly independent and the system is reformed,” Blumenthal said.

The Seattle Times reports that NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt told the committee that in both accidents, the MCAS was triggered by a single defective sensor. “What Boeing failed to account for in their assumptions is to consider MCAS could have failed for another reason — the MCAS could’ve activated because of a failure of the angle of attack, which would have led to numerous other alerts and warnings in the cockpit,” Sumwalt (pictured) told the committee.

The committee also heard from Christopher Hart. The former NTSB chairman led the Joint Authorities Technical Review (JATR) which was charged with reviewing the certification process for the 737 MAX and recommending improvements. Hart said that increasingly complex aircraft designs call into question a certification process "that has been based largely upon compliance" should also address safety issues. “As systems become more complex, the likelihood increases that compliance with applicable regulations does not necessarily ensure safety,” he said.

But Hart cautioned that the certification process for increasingly complex aircraft will likely include some delegation to planemakers for the foreseeable future "as regulators encounter increasing difficulty hiring and retaining technology leaders.”

“The leading technologists are not going to be with the regulator — they aren’t able to hire and retain the leading technologists — they’re going to be with the company,” Hart said.

(Images from file)

FMI: Source report