Latest round of Boeing hearings calls for decisive action

WASHINGTON — Federal aviation administrator Mike Whitaker will tour Capitol Hill this week, focusing on the agency’s oversight of Boeing Co., in what has become a familiar pattern — lots of tough questions but still no resolution to the automaker’s problems.

Accusations have been swirling for years that the FAA was too lenient with the planemaker after two plane crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.

Peter A. DeFazio, former chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee who conducted his own investigation of Boeing and approved revisions to aircraft certification in 2020, questions whether tough questions are enough.

“I thought things were going to change, with the scrutiny of the report, the changes in the law and the deficiencies that the review board found. But apparently, until Whitaker came along, that wasn’t the case,” DeFazio said in an interview. “It was business as usual.”

Whitaker, who became FAA administrator last October, will face two panels this week: the House Transportation Subcommittee on Aviation on Tuesday, which will focus on Boeing’s safety plan, and then the Senate Homeland Security Investigations Subcommittee on Wednesday, which will focus on the FAA’s oversight of Boeing before and after a mid-flight door plug exploded in January on a 737 Max 9.

The results of audits and investigations pointing to a fragile safety culture at Boeing and insufficient FAA oversight of the company’s operations left DeFazio with a sense of déjà vu.

DeFazio’s 2020 report found that Boeing had “undue influence” over FAA regulators. The Oregon Democrat, who leaves Congress in 2023, added that he had received reports that Boeing employees never saw an FAA inspector on the floor of the Max production line.

Last June, four years after those findings, a Senate Homeland Security Investigations subcommittee issued a preliminary report saying Boeing and the FAA still face safety issues. The committee found that in May, the FAA opened a new investigation into Boeing for potentially failing to perform required inspections on the 787 while falsely recording those inspections as having been performed.

DeFazio pointed to a lawsuit filed in December 2023 against Spirit AeroSystems Holdings Inc., Boeing’s main parts supplier, that claimed it deceived investors by hiding its “widespread and persistent quality defects.” A month later, the door stopper incident occurred.

“Didn’t the FAA know about this?” DeFazio asked. “If they say, ‘Yes, we’ll take care of it in a few weeks,’ well, in a few weeks the airplane will have evolved a lot.”

DeFazio said that if he were still president, he would ask Whitaker whether he believes he can ensure that FAA inspectors are doing their jobs properly and what the agency is doing to meet “rigorous” oversight standards. That includes questions about how many FAA inspectors are on the ground, what those inspectors are seeing and what whistleblowers are saying.

“And what about this new CEO? What goals has he set for himself in terms of reforming, rebuilding, or building a safety culture that has been abandoned by previous CEOs in the race for bonuses and profits?” DeFazio said. “I mean, how did it get this bad?”

Ed Pierson, former head of the Boeing 737 program and head of the new Aviation Safety Foundation, said he wants to know how the FAA is building on those measures. He said in an interview that the FAA should put even more inspectors on the ground, increase the quality of inspections and require more aggressive updates to the system.

“The FAA seemed surprised by the door explosion… They went out 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 to know about this problem. They’re supposed to be there to monitor production operations.”

“A lot of work”

Whitaker is no longer a stranger to the Capitol since the door stopper incident.

In June, he told lawmakers that the agency had been “too passive” in 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 needs to be a fundamental shift in the safety culture of the company to comprehensively address the quality and safety challenges,” Whitaker told the Senate Commerce Committee. “This is a systemic change, and there is much work to be done.”

Boeing declined to comment on the upcoming hearings.

The hearings will focus on the FAA’s plans to enforce safety review measures set out in Boeing’s 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, strengthen supplier oversight processes, encourage employees to report safety and quality issues and establish clear safety steps throughout the manufacturing process.

An agency spokesman said that since the door incident, the FAA has added inspectors to Boeing facilities and is conducting more audits and unannounced inspections.

But senators who heard from outgoing Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun in June seemed unconvinced.

“It’s not enough for Boeing to shrug its shoulders and say, ‘Well, mistakes happen.’ This is not an industry where it’s acceptable to cut corners, cut inspections, take shortcuts and rely on broken parts that just happen to be lying around,” Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said at the hearing. “This is not an industry where it’s acceptable to rush airplanes out the door.”

Calhoun, who had already announced his departure as CEO, resigned after the appearance and was replaced by Kelly Ortberg.

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