The House Transportation Committee has asked acting FAA chief executive Daniel Elwell about the agency’s oversight of the Boeing 737 Max 8’s safety certification, which resulted in two fatal plane crashes earlier this year killing a total of 346 people.
In October 2018, 189 people were killed in a Lion Air crash, this was followed by a Ethiopian Airlines flight which crashed in March killing 157 people.
This resulted in the worldwide grounding of all 737 Max planes with no word on when the aircraft is set to fly again.
The House Transportation Committee hearing conducted on May 15 marks the first in a series of investigations into why there was no training for pilots – which should have been by provided by regulators or Boeing – for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) on the 737 MAX aircraft, which is suspected in playing a critical role in the two crashes.
The 737 Max 8 has two angle of attack (AOA) disagree alerts, designed to let pilots know when two different sensors were reporting conflicting data. However, the AOA only receives data from one. If that one sensor malfunctions and feeds incorrect data, the MCAS function will pitch the nose down.
Boeing said it had intended to provide the feature as standard, but this was not the case, as it was only available if airlines purchased an optional indicator.
Just last week, Boeing admitted knew about a problem with its AOA disagree alert on 737 Max jets a year before the aircraft was involved in two fatal accidents.
Boeing had intended to deal with the problem in a later software update.
While Elwell did not say how closely FAA officials worked with Boeing engineers and test pilots in the certification of MCAS, he said that it took a total of five years to certify the 737 Max 8.
“The process included 297 certification flight tests, some of which encompassed tests of the MCAS functions,” Elwell said.
In response to questioning, Elwell also confirmed that before the first crash in Indonesia, pilots weren’t aware that the MCAS was installed on the plane.
In his statement, Ewell stated that Boeing should not have waited 13 months to tell the FAA that it inadvertently made an alarm alerting pilots to a mismatch of flight data optional on the 737 Max, instead of standard as on earlier 737s.
In further comments, Ewell said that the FAA will only allow the plane to resume flights when it is “absolutely safe to do so,” adding. “It’s important we get this right.”
In addition to this, he said: “Because the AOA disagree light was not a safety critical feature, it languished. I am not happy with a 13-month gap between finding that anomaly and us finding out about that. We are going to look into that.”
The FAA is planning a May 23 meeting in Fort Worth, Texas, with air regulators from around the world to updat them on the reviews. U.S. airlines have canceled flights as a result of the 737 MAX grounding into August.
