Dozens of relatives of passengers who died in the second crash of a Boeing 737 Max say U.S. regulators should expand their current review of the jet before it is allowed to fly again.
Family members say that in focusing on a flight-control system implicated in the crashes, the Federal Aviation Administration might miss other potential safety hazards on the plane.
FAA Administrator Stephen Dickson is likely to be asked about the extent of the FAA’s review of the plane when he appears before a House committee on Wednesday.
Investigations into the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia have pointed to a flight-control system called MCAS automatically pushing the noses of the planes down in response to faulty readings from a single sensor. The Max has been grounded worldwide while Boeing fixes the problems.
The FAA is reviewing changes that Boeing is making to MCAS and a separate issue around flight-control computers, but some relatives of the passengers want a nose-to-tail review of every critical system on the plane.
“That’s a tombstone mentality” to focus only on MCAS, said Nadia Milleron, whose daughter died in the March 10 crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Max. “You don’t just wait until people die to address (other) systems.”
Boeing’s chief engineer told Congress that the company did not test what would happen if a single sensor tied to MCAS failed. Critics have seized on that and other disclosures to raise questions about Boeing’s analysis of other key systems on the plane.
Boeing employees conducted those assessments under a decades-old FAA policy of relying on the technical knowledge of the companies that it regulates. FAA inspectors are supposed to oversee the work of those company employees, but published reports suggest that the agency knew little about MCAS when it certified the Max.
Lawmakers have suggested at previous hearings that Boeing downplayed the seriousness of an MCAS failure, possibly to avoid deeper scrutiny of the system by the FAA.
Dickson, a former Delta Air Lines pilot and executive, will be testifying about the Max for the first time since he became FAA administrator in August when he testifies before the House Transportation Committee on Wednesday.
Last month, Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and another lawmaker asked Dickson in a letter why FAA managers seemed to favor Boeing and overrule FAA experts in two other cases. One involved the placement of rudder cables on the Max that, in the view of FAA engineers, could make them vulnerable to being severed if an engine blew apart in flight.
Chris Moore, whose daughter died in the Ethiopian crash, sent a list of questions that he hopes DeFazio will ask Dickson, including why the agency didn’t ground the Max after the first crash, when a Lion Air Max plunged into the sea off the coast of Indonesia in October 2018.
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