Lawmakers appeared largely satisfied Thursday with the time it took for the U.S. to ground Boeing's 737 MAX jet after two fatal crashes overseas — though some still have questions about how the Federal Aviation Administration approved the plane to fly to begin with.
After a briefing by FAA leaders on Capitol Hill, House members showed none of the ire some had displayed earlier this week about the Trump administration's slowness to take Boeing's plane out of service, a pace that had the United States lagging behind the rest of the world.
Story Continued Below
Their remaining worries include a more far-reaching question about the FAA's decision to certify the plane without requiring pilots to be trained on a new Boeing software feature that has become a focus of the scrutiny into both crashes, which killed a combined 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Boeing and the FAA had jointly decided that the training was unnecessary, according to previous news reports following the Indonesia crash in October.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who was not part of the briefing, said she will have “some real concerns if it turns out that they have been overly generous with Boeing.” She sits on the committee with jurisdiction over aviation safety in the Senate.
Morning Transportation newsletter
A daily speed read on transportation and infrastructure — in your inbox.
But other members of Congress on Thursday were placing blame on foreign pilots, whom they suggested were not as well-trained as Americans — or expressing unhappiness with Ethiopia's handling of evidence from its deadly crash on Sunday.
Missouri Rep. Sam Graves, a private pilot and the top Republican on the House Transportation Committee, suggested that the pilots, not the plane, may be at fault for both Sunday's accident and the Indonesian disaster, which occurred in October.
“There have been more than 50,000 flights in this aircraft in North America and we haven’t had an instance of this,” Graves said. “But our pilots are trained to different standards."
Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) suggested that crucial data from the Ethiopian Airlines jet could have been obtained days ago if Ethiopian authorities had been willing to send its black boxes to the United States for analysis. Instead, they arrived Thursday in France, in what some saw as a snub to the United States.
"We were hopeful to get the data out of the flight data recorder on day one," DeFazio told reporters. "But then the Ethiopians thought they could get it, but then they said, 'No, the box is damaged, we can't get it.' We had hoped to move the flight data recorder at that point immediately to the U.S., but the Ethiopians had control and they decided to go a different way."
Thursday's briefing was led by acting FAA Administrator Dan Elwell and Ali Bahrami, the agency's associate administrator for aviation safety.
Afterward, House Transportation Aviation Subcommittee Chairman Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) — whose district includes a significant Boeing facility — stood by the FAA, calling the agency the “gold standard in safety.”
“The truth of it is, the FAA has made its name on being deliberate and using data to make decisions, and they have new data and made a decision about the grounding,” Larsen said.
DeFazio agreed that there did not seem to be any undue delay in obtaining or analyzing the satellite data that persuaded the FAA to ground the planes, even though governments including China, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Germany and France had taken the action a day or more earlier. When the U.S. finally did act, the announcement came via televised remarks from President Donald Trump, in a departure from previous administrations' handling of similar decisions.
transportation
Pilots complained at least 5 times about Boeing 737 MAX problems, records show
DeFazio said the FAA's decision took days because the satellite data used to underpin the decision is proprietary and required a “very specialized application” to analyze it. “It’s not routinely done that way,” he said.
But DeFazio still "has questions" about the process by which the FAA and Boeing certified the plane — in particular an assertion that "the plane was virtually identical to previous types and therefore no pilot retraining was necessary," he said.
The 737 MAX included a safety feature that was meant to prevent dangerous stalls but, in some circumstances, could send a plane into a fatal dive. Pilots' groups complained after October's crash in Indonesia that they hadn't know about the safety feature and that the plane's documentation did not make it clear how to switch it off.
When asked if he planned to hold hearings specifically on the certification issue, DeFazio wouldn't commit — though he and Larsen had issued a joint statement Wednesday calling for "a rigorous investigation into why the aircraft, which has critical safety systems that did not exist on prior models, was certified without requiring additional pilot training.”
DeFazio said Congress can put pressure on the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations standards-setting agency, to raise international pilot training minimums. “The standard that ICAO has as a minimum is even lower than our old standard, 200 hours for the second seat,” DeFazio said.
A software fix for MAX planes is being tested and will be rolled out fleet-wide over the next several weeks, lawmakers said. Pilots probably won't have completed the necessary re-training on the software update until the end of April or even later, after which the plane might be able to return to the skies, Larsen said.
Lawmakers said the software fix will change the way the anti-stall system works and will make it less likely to be triggered by faulty data.
French authorities said Thursday that “technical work” on the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from the crashed jet will begin Friday. Three investigators from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board are on their way to France to help with the analysis.
Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-Mich.), another member of the Transportation Committee, said he believes 737 MAX jets “are safe planes.”
“Boeing’s got a great reputation. And I’m from Michigan. It’s not like I’m in their backyard,” he said. “What you have is unforeseen circumstance, an unforeseen set of variables that wasn’t accounted for, wasn’t anticipated. … Ultimately, it’s about flying the airplane.”
Mitchell said he doesn’t think there has been any failure on the part of the FAA. “The plane was certified like many others,” he said.
