by Donald Wood
Last updated: 11:15 AM ET, Tue May 2, 2023
A new report from a government watchdog suggests several top
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials overruled pleas from engineers to
ground the Boeing
737 MAX planes after two deadly crashes.
According to The
Associated Press, the United States Department of Transportation’s
inspector general found that FAA officials wanted to “sort out raw data about
the two crashes” instead of immediately grounding the impacted aircraft in the
face of growing pressure.
The Transportation Department’s investigation unveiled that
FAA engineers working in Seattle believed the planes should have been grounded due
to perceived “similarities between the accidents.”
The report showed that an engineer assigned to the planes
suggested the chance of another crash was “13 times greater than FAA risk
guidelines allow” if the issues were not fixed. The engineer’s observations did
not go through managerial review “due to lack of detailed flight data.”
The government watchdog said FAA officials “waited for more
detailed data to arrive,” waiting until three days after the second fatal crash
to ground the Boeing MAX fleets. The inspector general’s office said the “caution
on grounding the MAX fit with its tendency of waiting for detailed data.”
In total, 346 people died in the two accidents in October
2018 and March 2019.
FAA officials told The AP that it agreed with the “inspector
general’s recommendations and had already identified the issues outlined in the
report.”
The government watchdog is pushing for the government to
properly document urgent safety decisions and be transparent about how they’re
made in crucial moments. As a result of the crashes, Congress has already
passed legislation to reform the process of reviewing new aircraft.
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