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The FAA situation is a difficult one to resolve - having full understanding of these systems requires a great deal of expertise, and that kind of expertise is f

The FAA situation is a difficult one to resolve - having full understanding of these systems requires a great deal of expertise, and that kind of expertise is found most easily at, obviously, the companies under regulation. More funding / regulators would certainly help, but I'm not sure if that would be sufficient. > but the FAA let them get away with it Well, the FAA thought the MCAS had a command limit of 0.6 degrees when it actually became 2.5 degrees after the changes mentioned in this article. From the other Seattle Times article about this: > If the final safety analysis document was updated in parts, it certainly still contained the 0.6 limit in some places and the update was not widely communicated within the FAA technical evaluation team. > “None of the engineers were aware of a higher limit,” said a second current FAA engineer. To me it's less of a they "let them get away with it" and more of a "they had limited resources and things slipped through". Unfortunately this difference doesn't really matter when 300+ people are dead

olliej 7y ago
I feel that's also by design: Boeing went out of their way to minimize the opportunity that the FAA had to catch what they were doing. Providing the experts no doubt helped, but just omitting changes by lying and saying all the changes were minimal to a system that had already passed safety review was their main tools. Does the FAA have issues? yes. Will this event reduce the influence of the FAA in the future? Probably - we're already seeing the European equivalent adopting a stance of "the FAA is working for the corporations they're meant to regulate". Honestly the various politicians who gutted the FAA are fairly directly responsible for causing significant long term harm to American influence (for good or bad, depending of who/what/where you are). Is Boeing entirely responsible? Yes. The FAA is meant to be adversarial to prevent companies from choosing money over safety, but fundamentally it was Boeing executives that made the choice to favour hiding design flaws to preserve profit (and hence bonuses). The fact is that any repercussions are almost certainly going to be entirely financial, and only harm shareholders (dividend and stock price) and lower level employees (e.g non-managers: managers, and especially executives, don't get canned when cash is low).

olliej 7y ago

I feel that's also by design: Boeing went out of their way to minimize the opportunity that the FAA had to catch what they were doing. Providing the experts no doubt helped, but just omitting changes by lying and saying all the changes were minimal to a system that had already passed safety review was their main tools. Does the FAA have issues? yes. Will this event reduce the influence of the FAA in the future? Probably - we're already seeing the European equivalent adopting a stance of "the FAA is working for the corporations they're meant to regulate". Honestly the various politicians who gutted the FAA are fairly directly responsible for causing significant long term harm to American influence (for good or bad, depending of who/what/where you are). Is Boeing entirely responsible? Yes. The FAA is meant to be adversarial to prevent companies from choosing money over safety, but fundamentally it was Boeing executives that made the choice to favour hiding design flaws to preserve profit (and hence bonuses). The fact is that any repercussions are almost certainly going to be entirely financial, and only harm shareholders (dividend and stock price) and lower level employees (e.g non-managers: managers, and especially executives, don't get canned when cash is low).