[ad_1]
House Report on Boeing 737 Max Accidents: Corporate Criminality, FAA Complicity, But No Liability
By Barry Gray
September 17, 2020
On Wednesday, the Democratic majority in the House Infrastructure and Transportation Committee released the results of its 18-month investigation into the two Boeing 737 Max aircraft crashes that killed a combined 346 passengers and crew.
The 238-page report provides compelling evidence that Boeing consciously risked the lives of countless thousands of people by putting into service an aircraft that it knew had potentially fatal design flaws. It systematically concealed dangers from government regulators, airline customers, pilots, and the general public.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), even when it learned of the safety hazards of the new aircraft, certified the 737 Max and failed to alert airline workers or passengers to the dangers.
The result was the terrible crash of Lion Air Flight 610, some 13 minutes after takeoff from Jakarta on October 29, 2018, killing all 189 people on board. Even after this disaster, in which a malfunction repeatedly forced the nose of the plane until it crashed in the Java Sea, Boeing and the FAA kept the 737 Max in the air and failed to fix the automated flight control flaw that caused the accident.
This led less than five months later to the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, on March 10, 2019. That disaster followed the same pattern and ended with the plane crashing to the ground and killing all 157 men, women and men. children on board.
It was only after this second accident that Boeing and the FAA agreed to ground the 737 Max, and that was only after every other major government in the world rejected their claims that the plane was safe and banned it from their airspace. .
The House Democrats’ report cites testimony from Ed Pierson, a senior plant supervisor at the 737 Max production facility in Renton, Wash. And a retired Navy squad commander, before the committee last December. Pierson recounted how in 2018 he told the 737’s general manager, Scott Campbell, about multiple safety issues and defects at the Renton plant.
“For the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I hesitate to put my family on a Boeing plane,” he told Campbell, adding that the military would suspend production to address safety concerns. Campbell responded, “The military is not a for-profit organization.”
The report, which members of the Republican committee declined to endorse, makes clear that 346 lives were destroyed and countless more threatened because the aircraft manufacturer and the defense contracting giant made decisions calculated to sacrifice security to maximize participation. market and corporate earnings.
But despite the incriminating evidence in its own report, the Democratic majority is not proposing action to hold Boeing or FAA officials accountable. There are no calls for criminal prosecution and no financial penalties are proposed.
This is under conditions where the bipartisan CARES Act passed last March effectively allocated $ 17 billion in taxpayer money to prop up the company, and the Federal Reserve has backed a $ 25 billion bond sale by the signing as part of the government’s multi-million dollar investment. rescue of the American business elite caused by the pandemic.
Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO of Boeing during the 737 Max development period, resigned under fire last December and received a severance package worth $ 80.7 million.
Even as the House publishes its damning report, moreover, the FAA is signaling that it will soon allow the 737 Max to resume commercial flights.
The report cites five different areas of neglect and cover-up. In “Production Pressures,” he notes, “There was tremendous financial pressure on Boeing and the 737 Max program to compete with Airbus’ new A320neo aircraft.”
In other words, Boeing, which accounted for a large part of the rise on Wall Street after Donald Trump’s election, was under the sights of major shareholders and banks to speed up production of its new jet and cut costs in order to win. the award. Competing with its European-based rival for market share, especially in expanding markets like China.
That market share, earnings and share price overshadowed Boeing’s safety was clear from the 737 Max’s origins. Rather than design a new generation of mid-range aircraft carriers, Boeing decided to save time and money by revamping its five-decade-old 737. The main innovation was a larger engine that had to be positioned higher on the wing. However, the company soon discovered that the new configuration caused the plane to stop.
To make up for this design flaw, Boeing installed a new automated flight control system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. The House of Representatives report lists “Faulty Design and Performance Assumptions” in relation to MCAS as the second major factor in accidents.
Boeing concealed the existence of MCAS from its airline customers and its pilots to avoid having to retrain pilots in flight simulators for the new aircraft, a costly and time-consuming process.
Additionally, he designed MCAS to be triggered by only one of the aircraft’s two external angle of attack (AOA) sensors, rather than both, as is accepted practice for functions that are critical to the safety of an aircraft. Furthermore, it failed to inform the airlines and pilots, as well as the FAA, that a warning alert listed as a feature of the aircraft, telling the cockpit that the two sensors were not in agreement and therefore one was not working properly, it was not working for 80 percent of its flight. active 737 Max.
As a result, when MCAS was activated on the two doomed flights as a result of incorrect information from a faulty AOA sensor, the pilots were unable to determine the cause of the repeated down dives and were unable to stabilize the aircraft.
That Boeing was well aware of the problems with MCAS is demonstrated by the fact that MCAS was referenced in half a million emails and other internal documents.
Entitled “Culture of Concealment,” the report provides a multitude of examples of Boeing withholding critical information from the FAA, its customers, and Max pilots. This includes internal test data from 2016 revealing that it took more than 10 seconds for a Boeing test pilot to diagnose and respond to uncommanded MCAS activation in a flight simulation. The pilot described the situation as “catastrophic”. Federal guidelines assume that pilots will respond to this condition within four seconds.
The fourth area cited in the report is entitled “Representation in conflict.” This is a euphemism for the FAA’s complete subordination to Boeing and the lack of serious regulatory oversight. The report cites, in particular, the policy implemented under the Democratic and Republican administrations of delegating supervision of the FAA to Boeing employees. These so-called “authorized representatives” routinely concealed from top FAA officials the safety issues that arose in the design, production, and certification of the 737 Max. In other cases, FAA superiors sided with Boeing and dismissed reported safety concerns.
In the end, the FAA allowed Boeing to put the 737 Max into service without the pilots having to receive training in flight simulators. Instead, it authorized a total of two hours of “training” on an iPad.
In December 2018, a few weeks after the Lion Air Flight 610 crash, the FAA conducted a risk assessment and estimated that without a solution to MCAS over the life of the 737 Max fleet, there could be 15 additional fatal accidents. resulting in more than 2900. deaths. However, the FAA allowed the 737 Max to continue flying while Boeing worked on a software patch for MCAS, setting the stage for the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 just weeks later.
Finally, under the title “Boeing’s Influence on the FAA’s Oversight Structure,” the report offers multiple examples of the FAA aligning itself with Boeing and dismissing warnings from its own experts.
House committee chair Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) said after the findings were released: “Our report presents disturbing revelations about how Boeing, under pressure to compete with Airbus and generate profits for Wall Street, escaped scrutiny. of the FAA, withheld critical information from pilots and eventually commissioned aircraft that killed 346 innocent people. What is particularly irritating is how Boeing and the FAA played with public safety in the critical period between the two accidents. “
What he did not mention, however, is that he and his fellow Democrats supported the passage of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, which expanded self-regulation for Boeing and other corporations in the airline industry. In fact, deregulation of the airline industry began in 1978 under the Democratic administration of President Jimmy Carter, leading to the dismantling of the Civil Aeronautics Board and its replacement by the much weaker and more flexible FAA.
What neither the Democrats nor the media are talking about is the root cause of the mass deaths caused by Boeing and its government accomplices: the capitalist profit system.
As the World Socialist website wrote in a statement titled “Boeing Executives Must Be Tried For Murder”:
The elevation of profit above human life is the social essence of capitalism. The Max 8 disasters are not simply symptoms of corporate greed, but the end result of the capitalist system itself, which subordinates all social needs to private profit. There is a basic contradiction between the interests of society, including safe, efficient and economical air travel, and private ownership of essential industries, as well as the division of the world economy between rival nation-states. The same basic contradictions of capitalism are fueling the geopolitical and economic conflicts that threaten nuclear war and ecological disasters.
The only way to prevent further disasters is to eliminate the profit motive of commercial flight, end the dominance of Wall Street, and replace the nightmare of the capitalist market with an internationally organized and rationally planned air transport system. This requires the nationalization of the airlines and aerospace companies and their transformation into publicly owned and democratically controlled public services.
The author also recommends:
Boeing executives must be tried for murder
[13 December 2019]
Bipartisan corporate bailout grants $ 17 billion to Boeing
[27 March 2020]
