Senate Report Faults FAA And Boeing For Failures In Review Of 737 Max

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A Boeing 737 Max lands earlier this month at an airport in Porto Alegre, Brazil. On Friday, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation released its probe into what went wrong with the airliner after it was involved in multiple deadly crashes.

Silvio Avila/AFP via Getty Images

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Silvio Avila/AFP via Getty Images

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But the Senate committee found fault with the tests that ultimately resulted in the plane’s recertification in the U.S., including the claim that FAA officials and representatives from Boeing together «established a pre-determined outcome to those tests.

«Boeing officials inappropriately coached test pilots in the MCAS simulator testing contrary to testing protocol. This test took place over a year after the second 737 MAX crash and during recertification efforts, the report alleges. «It appears, in this instance, FAA and Boeing were attempting to cover up important information that may have contributed to the 737 MAX tragedies.

The Senate report also detailed a number of other problems at the FAA and its parent agency, the Department of Transportation, including:

Retaliations against whistleblowers and failures to hold FAA senior managers accountable for inadequate training protocols

The Transportation Department’s failure to «produce relevant documents requested by the committee

Possible obstruction by «FAA senior leaders of a review of the 737 MAX crashes by a Transportation Department inspector general.

«This dysfunction, the report concluded, «inserts an unnecessary risk to the flying public.

In a statement emailed to NPR on Saturday, the FAA pushed back on what it described as the report’s «unsubstantiated allegations.

«Working closely with other international regulators, the FAA conducted a thorough and deliberate review of the 737 MAX, the agency said. «We are confident that the safety issues that played a role in the tragic accidents involving Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 have been addressed through the design changes required and independently approved by the FAA and its partners.

Boeing, too, said in a statement that the company «learned many hard lessons from the pair of disasters — though Boeing did not address the report’s allegations specifically.

For both Boeing and the FAA, the Senate committee’s findings represent the second damning congressional report in roughly three months. The House Transportation Committee in September found that Boeing had displayed «a disturbing pattern of technical miscalculations and troubling management misjudgments, while the FAA suffered from «numerous oversight lapses and accountability gaps.

Still, those findings have not dissuaded several airlines from resuming flights with the troubled aircraft. Brazil’s Gol Airlines resumed commercial service with the jetliner earlier this month, a week after Ireland’s Ryanair placed an order estimated to cost more than $7 billion.