Boeing, FAA's 'culture of concealment' led to plane crashes, Congressional committee says

[Eugene]

Related: Final Committee Report: The Design, Development & Certification of the Boeing 737 MAX

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Source: WJLA-TV

Boeing, FAA's 'culture of concealment' led to plane crashes, Congressional committee says

by Lisa Fletcher/ABC7 NewsWednesday, September 16th 2020

Early Wednesday morning, the U.S. House of Representatives' Transportation Committee released its final investigation on the Boeing 737-max crashes that killed 346 people.

After an 18-month investigation, 600,000 pages of records, and two-dozen interviews, the House Transportation Committee determined that among other things, a "culture of concealment" by Boeing and the FAA led to crashes that may have been preventable.

The 246-page investigative report outlines five key areas that the lawmakers believe lead to the crashes – including:


•Production pressures that emphasized cost-cutting over safety
•Faulty technical design and assumptions about pilot responses
•A culture of concealment
•Misplaced oversight authority
•Boeing's influence over the FAA

The report details quote the "inconceivable and inexcusable" withholding of critical safety information that could have altered the fate of 346 innocent people who died in two crashes, just five months apart...one in the Java Sea, the other in Ethiopia.

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Read more: https://wjla.com/news/local/boeing-faa-plane-crashes-congressional-committee-report

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Source: BBC

Boeing's 'culture of concealment' to blame for 737 crashes

16 September 2020

Two fatal crashes of Boeing 737 Max aircraft were partly due to the plane-maker's unwillingness to share technical details, a congressional investigation has found.

It blames a "culture of concealment" at Boeing, but says the regulatory system was also "fundamentally flawed".

Boeing said it had "learned many hard lessons" from the accidents.

But families of the victims accused the company and the regulator of continuing to hide information.

The US report is highly critical of both Boeing and the regulator, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA).

"Boeing failed in its design and development of the Max, and the FAA failed in its oversight of Boeing and its certification of the aircraft," the 18-month investigation concluded.

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Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54174223

[Thunderbeast]

1. Boeing's problems are older than the MAX failures.

The certification of the NEO generation of the 737 depended on precision fabrication processes in fuselage assemblies that Boeing's supplier could not execute in volume. Planes were assembled with ribs cut by hand instead of machine tools.

When a supply-chain manager discovered the deficiency, she was ignored. She became a whistleblower who was fired by Boeing and ignored by the FAA.