Transportation

The lawmakers’ proposal is in effect a sharp rebuke for an agency that until just a few months ago was considered the gold standard for safety worldwide

Some lawmakers want an independent review before the FAA allows Boeing’s troubled 737 MAX back into the skies — yet another sign of how far the agency’s credibility has fallen following two fatal plane crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

With probes mounting, and as Congress prepares to hold its first hearing on Wednesday into how the plane got certified as safe to fly, among other issues, House Transportation Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) took the unusual step of calling for the planes to remain grounded until a third party validates whatever fixes the agency requires. Boeing has been running tests on a software fix that it hopes the FAA will sign off on soon, saying Tuesday that its “final submission” is expected at the end of the week.

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The lawmakers’ proposal is in effect a sharp rebuke for an agency that until just a few months ago was considered the gold standard for safety worldwide.

“The traveling public needs assurances that the FAA will only recertify the aircraft for flights if and when the FAA, outside safety and technical experts and pilots agree the aircraft is safe to fly,” DeFazio said Tuesday. He called for an “independent, third-party review” to ensure that Boeing’s software fix is comprehensive and that pilots have the training they need to fly the aircraft safely before the planes are allowed back in service.

He insisted his proposal shouldn’t be interpreted as a “no confidence” vote in the FAA and that his call for a review is based on past precedent. He cited a review done related to the 2013 grounding of another Boeing plane, the 787 Dreamliner. But that review was ordered up by the FAA and wasn’t done by a third party, and the Dreamliner fleet’s recertification wasn’t predicated on its results. A DeFazio aide later said that it’s not a “rebuke” of the FAA.

DeFazio’s call came amid deepening scrutiny of the process the FAA uses to vet aircraft as safe to fly — and especially the major role that industry players like Boeing play in the process, under mandates from Congress to delegate many inspection, testing and certification tasks to manufacturers. Tuesday evening, DeFazio, along with Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), sent a letter to the FAA formally requesting the review, though it does not explicitly request that it be done as a condition to allow the jets back into the air.

“It is imperative that any technical modifications proposed … are comprehensive and reliable,” the letter read. “In order to provide this level of assurance, we urge you to engage an independent, third-party review composed of individuals with the technical skills and expertise to objectively advise on any measures being considered requiring the safety certification of new and novel technology.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who didn’t sign the letter, echoed DeFazio’s proposal and said Boeing and its airline customers should support it. “The credibility of the current safety oversight system is so significantly challenged,” he said. “The credibility is so much in question that they would be well served to have some sort of independent authority.”

The FAA said it had not yet seen DeFazio’s letter and therefore had no comment. But acting Administrator Dan Elwell is expected to say at a Senate hearing on Wednesday that his agency “welcomes external review of our systems, processes and recommendations.”

Senate Commerce Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), whose panel will hold Wednesday’s hearing, said he hasn’t spoken with DeFazio about his call for a third-party review but still believes the FAA is the “gold standard” for aviation safety. “It’s good to ask the questions, but I still think the FAA is well-run and reliable,” Wicker said. “But we’ll ask those questions and we’ll see. New facts may come to light.”

Blumenthal said he plans to press the FAA about how delegating its authority to certify the plane to Boeing “may have contributed to the absolutely disastrous software and training that was so lacking in the Boeing 737 MAX 8,” and suggested that the FAA may have been “trying to do safety on the cheap.”

Until just a few months ago, the FAA was widely seen as the global leader in aviation safety, coming off a nine-year period in which nobody had died in a domestic passenger airline accident on U.S. soil — and other countries typically followed its FAA’s lead. But those assumptions have been upended after the second 737 MAX crash occurred in Ethiopia on March 10, as the FAA took three days to ground the fleet in the U.S., even as dozens of other nations closed their skies to the plane until the United States stood alone.

Since then, the European Union and Canada have said they will do their own reviews independent of the FAA before deciding whether to let the 737 MAX fly again.

DeFazio said his own suggestion for a third-party review has precedent in one that occurred after the Department of Transportation grounded Boeing’s Dreamliners following a spate of smoke problems and electrical fires. But the FAA ordered the Dreamliner review, which was performed by FAA and Boeing engineers who were independent only to the extent that they didn’t participate in the original Dreamliner certification. That report wasn’t concluded until almost a year after the FAA recertified the fleet as safe to fly again.

Now, one of America’s chief lawmakers is essentially indicating that the FAA is too close to Boeing to certify itself that any 737 MAX fix is adequate, amid a cascade of scrutiny on the agency’s trend of increasingly delegating its aircraft approval tasks to the manufacturers it is supposed to oversee. Those include cadres of Boeing-paid workers acting on the FAA’s behalf to sign off on compliance.

DeFazio said Monday evening that he had concerns when Congress granted the new delegation authority in 2003, a strategy lawmakers have repeatedly endorsed in legislation as recently as last fall.

“I couldn’t quite see how we were going to create these firewalls,” DeFazio said. “Someone’s writing your paycheck but you’re going to be there as ‘I’m representing the FAA’ and you’re going to be totally immune to pressure from the company,” he said. He observed that the United States has had a “really great decade” in terms of aviation safety, and the delegation system “seemed to be working.”

“But obviously there are problems,” he said.

The Senate will go first in drilling down on those problems, with a hearing before a Commerce Committee panel on Wednesday, with a significant focus on how the plane was certified as safe to fly with design flaws now suspected in two crashes. Some senators will also want to know more about how the FAA reached its decision to ground the jets — and why it took longer than other nations — as well as how software changes intended to remedy a software glitch will be implemented.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), a member of the subcommittee, said he isn’t thinking of the hearing as a “gotcha moment.”

“I want to know what their process is for deploying this new software and training,” he said. “I want to look at sort of the tick-tock, the certification process, the self-certification. And I want to know why it was so quiet at the FAA during that 48 hour period” between the first groundings of the 737 MAX when the U.S. took them out of service.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said she plans to ask questions about pilot training standards.

“If you have to fumble around in the cockpit and get the manual to find out what’s going on, what is the international training regimen and whose responsibility is that?” Capito said. “I don’t think it’s our FAA’s responsibility to train pilots in other countries, but I guess that would go to Boeing and what kind of coordination FAA has with other aviation agencies around the globe to have some uniformity in training.”

According to his prepared testimony, Elwell will tell the panel that the agency is aware that its “oversight approach needs to evolve to ensure that the FAA remains the global leader in achieving aviation safety.”

He will also emphasize that the agency’s delegation program “is not self-certification; the FAA retains strict oversight authority.” He will say that the FAA was “directly involved in the system safety review” of the Boeing 737 MAX anti-stall system and that the FAA has tested Boeing’s proposed software update, initially sent to the agency on Jan. 21, about three months after a 737 MAX operated by Indonesia’s Lion Air plunged into the Java Sea.

The grounding will be lifted “only when the FAA’s analysis of the facts and technical data indicate that it is appropriate,” Elwell is expected to say.

Senate staff expect not only subpanel members but also members of the full Commerce Committee will question Elwell, Transportation Department Inspector General Calvin Scovel and National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt.

The chairman of the subcommittee, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), intends to hold additional hearings related to the crashes in the future, staff said.

Earlier Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao will appear before a Senate Appropriations subpanel to answer questions about President Donald Trump’s budget proposal. But members could also ask Chao about the FAA and Boeing.

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), has questioned why the FAA didn’t mandate that 737 MAX jets have a so-called disagree light that turns on if the plane’s two angle-of-attack sensors have different readings. Boeing offered a “disagree light,” but only as an optional add-on at extra cost.

Tanya Snyder contributed to this story.