A panel of international aviation regulators found that Boeing withheld key information about the 737 Max from pilots and regulators, and the Federal Aviation Administration lacked the expertise to understand an automated flight system implicated in two deadly crashes of Max jets.
In its report issued Friday, the panel made 12 recommendations for improving the FAA’s certification of new aircraft, including more emphasis on understanding how pilots will handle the increasing amount of automation driving modern planes.
The report, called a joint authorities technical review, focused on FAA approval of a new flight-control system called MCAS that automatically pushed the noses of Max jets down — based on faulty readings from a single sensor — before crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people.
During the certification process, Boeing changed the design of MCAS, making it more powerful, but key people at the FAA were not always told. The review committee said it believed that if FAA technical staff knew more about how MCAS worked, they likely would have seen the possibility that it could overpower pilots’ efforts to stop the nose-down pitch.
MCAS evolved “from a relatively benign system to a not-so-benign system without adequate knowledge by the FAA,” the panel’s chief, former National Transportation Safety Board chairman Christopher Hart, told reporters. He faulted poor communication and said there was no indication of intentional wrongdoing.
The Max has been grounded since March. The five-month international review was separate from the FAA’s consideration of whether to recertify the plane once Boeing finishes updates to software and computers on the plane. Boeing hopes to win FAA approval before year end, although several previous Boeing forecasts have turned out to be wrong.
FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said in a prepared statement that the agency would review all recommendations from the panel and take appropriate action.
Boeing said it would work with the FAA to review the panel’s recommendations and “continuously improve the process and approach used to validate and certify airplanes going forward.”
The international panel included members from U.S. agencies, and aviation regulators from Europe, Canada, China and other countries.
Hart, the chairman, said the U.S. aviation-safety system “has worked very well for decades” — he noted there has been just one accident-related death on a U.S. airliner in the past 10 years — “but this is a system that has room for improvement.”
The panel’s report is likely to increase questions around the FAA’s use of aircraft manufacturers’ own employees in the certification of parts and systems.
