WASHINGTON — Federal Aviation Administrator Mike Whitaker will make the rounds on Capitol Hill this week focusing on the agency’s oversight of Boeing Co. in what has become a familiar pattern — plenty of tough questions yet still no resolution to the manufacturer’s problems.
Accusations have swirled for years that the FAA was too lax on the aircraft manufacturer following two plane crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.
One person wondering whether tough questions are enough is former House Transportation and Infrastructure Chair Peter A. DeFazio, who led his own investigation into Boeing and passed aircraft certification overhauls in 2020.
“I thought — with the scrutiny of the report, the changes in the law, the deficiencies pointed out by the review commission — that things would change. But apparently, until Whitaker came in, they didn’t,” DeFazio said in an interview. “It was just business as usual.”
Whitaker, who became FAA administrator last October, will face two panels this week: The House Transportation Subcommittee on Aviation on Tuesday, focusing on Boeing’s safety plan, then the Senate Homeland Security Investigations Subcommittee on Wednesday, focused on FAA’s oversight of Boeing before and after the January mid-flight door-plug blowout on a 737 Max 9.
The results from audits and investigations reporting a shaky safety culture from Boeing and insufficient FAA oversight of the company’s operations have left DeFazio with a sense of déjà vu.
DeFazio’s 2020 report found that Boeing had “undue influence” over the FAA regulators. The Oregon Democrat, who left Congress in 2023, added that he received reports that Boeing employees had never seen an FAA inspector on the floor of the Max line.
This June, four years after those findings, a Senate Homeland Security Investigations Subcommittee released a preliminary report that said Boeing and the FAA are still facing safety issues. The panel found the FAA in May opened a new investigation into Boeing over potentially failing to complete required inspections on the 787 while falsely recording those inspections as being completed.
DeFazio pointed to a December 2023 lawsuit against Spirit AeroSystems Holdings Inc., Boeing’s main parts supplier, that alleged it misled its investors by hiding its “widespread and sustained quality failures.” A month later, the door plug incident occurred.
“Was it that the FAA was unaware about that?” DeFazio asked. “If they say, ‘Yeah, we’ll get to it in a couple of weeks,’ well in a couple of weeks, that plane’s moved down the line a long way.”
DeFazio said if he was still chairman, he would ask Whitaker whether he thinks he can get FAA inspectors to properly perform their jobs and what the agency is doing to meet the standards of “rigorous” oversight. That includes questions about how many FAA inspectors are on the floor, what those inspectors are finding and what whistleblowers are saying.
“How about this new CEO? What kind of mandates has he set down in terms of reforming or rebuilding or having a safety culture, which was abandoned by the former CEOs in the chase of bonuses and profit,” DeFazio said. “I mean, how could it have gotten that bad?”
Ed Pierson, a former Boeing 737 program senior manager and director of the newly formed Foundation for Aviation Safety, said he’s looking to hear how the FAA is building on those actions. He said in an interview that the FAA should place even more inspectors on the floor, increase the quality of inspections and mandate more aggressive system updates.
“The FAA acted surprised by the [door blowout] … they ran in there and did an audit, and came back and the audit failed. That’s a big indicator,” Pierson said. “They should have been the first ones to know about this problem. They’re supposed to be there monitoring production operations.”
‘A lot of work’
Whitaker has been no stranger to Capitol Hill since the door-plug incident.
He told lawmakers in June that the agency had been “too hands off” on regulating Boeing before that incident, despite aviation safety legislation in the fiscal 2021 spending bill that expanded the FAA’s regulatory role over aircraft manufacturers. That legislation came after the two 737 Max crashes.
“There must be a fundamental shift in the company’s safety culture in order to holistically address its quality and safety challenges,” Whitaker told the Senate Commerce Committee then. “This is about systemic change, and there’s a lot of work to be done.”
Boeing declined to provide comment on the upcoming hearings.
The hearings will focus on the FAA’s plans to enforce safety overhaul actions Boeing set out in its safety and quality plan, which the manufacturer was required to develop in response to the January incident.
The plan highlights Boeing’s efforts to increase employee training programs, boost processes for monitoring its suppliers, encourage employees to report safety and quality concerns and set clear safety milestones along the manufacturing process.
An agency spokesperson said that since the door-plug incident, the FAA has added inspectors at Boeing facilities and is conducting more audits and unannounced inspections.
But senators who heard from outgoing Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun in June didn’t seem convinced.
“It’s not enough for Boeing to shrug their shoulders and say ‘Well, mistakes happen.’ This is not an industry where it’s okay to cut corners, to reduce inspections, to take shortcuts and rely on broken parts that happened to be sitting around,” Investigations Subcommittee Chair Richard Blumenthal, D- Conn., said during the hearing. “It is not an industry where it’s okay to rush planes out the door.”
Calhoun, who had already announced his departure as CEO, stepped down following that appearance and was replaced by Kelly Ortberg.
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