FAA is granting Boeing “limited delegation” to certify airworthiness
theregister.com
theregister.com
> Boeing is a major defense contractor, and the move will put executives close to Pentagon leaders.
According to the book Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison the entire decline of Boeing started when they moved their HQ from Seattle to Chicago and deprioritized engineering, quality and safety.
Now they can't even sell planes so their new focus is corruption I guess. The good news for them is that business is booming.
The number of people who work in government and the military and aren't subject to elections is orders of magnitude greater than the number of elected politicians.
The regulatory failures usually come first, either a failure of antitrust (they're allowed to buy up the competition) or a regulatory environment that itself puts the competition out of business. Then you have a consolidated market.
Monopolies are like cancer. They metastasize. If you didn't have regulations that keep upstart competitors out of the market before, the incumbents will welcome them if not actively lobby in favor of them. And then you're stuck with them. They're too big to fail. If you had 10 other domestic aircraft companies and one of them was screwing up, they'd not only have to contend with customers going somewhere else, the government could actually punish them. Whereas if there's only one, what are you going to do? Bankrupt the only domestic supplier? And they know it.
The only way out of it is to restore competition. But the longer you wait, the harder it gets to fix it.
Why? Copying from another comment I made on this thread:
(Caution, my thoughts are a bit rambly and scattered. It's been a while since I studied this in detail for a class where I had deep divided into the max 8 crash and FAA's lapse, so the details are a bit foggy.)
The short answer is that unfortunately it's practically almost impossible to do this any other way, short of massively increasing funding for the FAA (which is presumably politically not going to be done.)
The long answer is, anyone with expertise ends up going to work at an aerospace company where they are properly compensated. You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc. (This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries where you need a high level of technical expertise.) And if you think it should be easily doable... here's a thought experiment. Say 20 people in boeing know about MCAS (pre crashes and their publicity). If even only 2 FAA employees need to be technically sound in their knowledge of such a niche system, that's about 10% of how many boeing employees know about it.
Now if you extrapolate that to all systems and all employees across multiple companies... you see why it's an issue for one agencies to have such deep knowledge about everything. (And this isn't even considering what happens when people quit etc.)
Because of this, the most obvious answer to "how does the FAA, without much engineers, decide what's safe or not", is to ask the experts and just have them certify stuff, well, not under oath, but as close to that as possible.
how much smaller was Boeing (and the whole aviation industry) back then?
Most of us work in tech. Imagine an auditor coming in and trying to sort out if one of the most complex systems at your company is "safe." What's safe? Every previously known failure mode and every new one you're going to be blamed for when it happens.
MAYBE, MAYBE the insurance company assessments/audits are kind of related to what you are talking about. But not really. But not the FAA ones. They are such a different beast with so much brain power involved along with people with a combined centuries of experience in this stuff, it's hard to explain without being around it.
Which is fine for low states they deal with and not fine with planes.
There's so many moving parts to aircraft certification honestly I was surprised when a new design would get type design certification. Which is why Boeing tries to do things like shoehorn in a new airplane under an older airplane type design (MAX) so they don't have to get a whole new type design approved.
You're correct in that the FAA can't (or at least, it would be wildly impractical) have a staff of in-house experts that equal or exceed the experience of the manufacturer engineers on every possible topic.
But, that's not necessary to enforce a process of quality. It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality, including which experts need to sign off on what. Then the FAA needs to hold the engineers who sign off professionally responsible and their managment legally liable if any circumvention is discovered down the line.
You have no ideea.
It's sooo extremely easy to fake everything! I'm working with ISO15189 right now. I could just fill paperwork saying I did things that I didn't really do. Nobody could tell the difference. Sometimes there's an audit. It's announced months in advance and they only just look at the paperwork. I'm the only one here that knows the analysers have trace logs and how do get/print them. Some of those logs are just CSV text files. I could fake those too.
According to ISO, the company should do an audit every year. Last one was 3 years ago, but I'm certain that someone wrote down every year that they did it.
Don't be so confident that falsification can be spotted. It usually can't. Or require very time-consuming cross-checks that I never saw happen in my entire 20y career, such as comparing the number times an internal control was run vs. the quantity of consumables used in the process that were bought.
In case of Boeing, the other problem is... who's going to look before the plane crashes?
Paperwork should be regularly audited and discrepancies investigated. The other nice thing about fear is that it should be very specific - people should know exactly what they have to do to not feel it.
The consequences part that I mentioned is where it's at, if one wanted to design a functioning system.
If there's an incident and the investigation reveals an engineer signed off on something that was contrary to process, they lose their license and get to switch careers to something else.
If it turns out management pushed the engineer to do that, personal liability on management means they get to do some long jail time.
With those two enforcement points, you cut out nearly all the cheating.
Oh, of course it'll never happen. I'm just responding to the thread that if a government actually wanted to create an effective quality mechanism, it's possible.
Having seen how quality processes work, it's really not a substitute for competent oversight. You can have a crap design and get all the paperwork is completely 100% in order, in fact the paperwork then makes it a lot more time consuming and expensive to fix the design!
I should add that the regulator will be to the letter. I was told a case where the company followed the test form a spec from standard x, but standard x was superseded twice. The latest spec and standard x, the testing was exactly the same but because the company had done the testing against x and not the latest they had to redo all the work. Regulator would not shift or give dispensation on passing it.
Anybody wanting a stable long term cash flows will align, and do their best to fix this. This is how banks were put in line after 2008, very effectively. No western bank knowingly circumvents new related regulations, punishments would be absolutely crushing and never worth the risk. Those people up there are not stupid, this is how calculus for criminals works.
EASA fills a similar role on a budget a 100 times smaller (in USD it's ~300m), paying for ~800 personnel.
The main difference is that EASA doesn't handle ATC, but it shows that the aspect of the FTC's duties we are talking about here really can't be that expensive.
If you'd 10x the budget of the FAA, it would have the same budget as the entire EU or 4x Airbus/Boeing's revenue. That's ridiculous.
10x is a bit ridiculous but I'm not sure it's that ridiculous for the FAA to have more expenditures than Boeing.
Sure, FAA (requested) budget is 22 Billion [1] while Boeing's revenue is 66 Billion [2]. However, United Airlines revenue is 57 Billion [3]. The FAA doesn't just manage Boeing so if we start adding up _every_ airline, airport, etc revenue I think that a budget of 66 Billion won't look as silly anymore. I mean they can't properly staff ATC currently so very trivially their current expenditures is too low.
[1]: https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/F...
I was trying to take the ATC component of the FAA out of the equation and illustrate why that is necessary. We should be looking specifically at the arm that certifies aircraft and try to figure out which order of magnitude we're dealing with. Luckily their European counterpart exists, which does not do ATC and thus allows us to get a better idea.
In fact if you look at the FAA's budget request breakdown you can see that the requested budget for their entire AVS services arm is less than 2B[1] (still much more expensive than EASA, but not too terrible).
While your comment is interesting, it's only tangential to what is being discussed.
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/F...
I'm struggling to reconcile how you can give a company & self-certification system that failed so egregiously another chance.
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-statement-boeing-airworthin...
https://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/designees_...
It is typical for aerospace companies to have in-house "FAA delegates" who function in the stead of direct FAA reviewers, and it looks like all that is going on here is the FAA is allowing Boeing to go back to using their own internal delegates (every other week!).
The short answer is that unfortunately it's practically almost impossible to do this any other way, short of massively increasing funding for the FAA (which is presumably politically not going to be done.)
The long answer is, anyone with expertise ends up going to work at an aerospace company where they are properly compensated. You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc. (This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries where you need a high level of technical expertise.) And if you think it should be easily doable... here's a thought experiment. Say 20 people in boeing know about MCAS (pre crashes and their publicity). If even only 2 FAA employees need to be technically sound in their knowledge of such a niche system, that's about 10% of how many boeing employees know about it.
Now if you extrapolate that to all systems and all employees across multiple companies... you see why it's an issue for one agencies to have such deep knowledge about everything. (And this isn't even considering what happens when people quit etc.)
Because of this, the most obvious answer to "how does the FAA, without much engineers, decide what's safe or not", is to ask the experts and just have them certify stuff, well, not under oath, but as close to that as possible.
Incorrect. The engineers acting as FAA delegates are paid by Boeing, not the FAA. Toxic incentive. Stop shining that apple Leroy, plane needs to get shipped, and bossman is getting testy.
As far as your arguments on the information propagation front go, MCAS was deliberately designed against industry best practices and perception managed from regulators to do everything possible to avoid simulator training. Stop assuming good faith. This was malice. Malice that could only be executed upon because Boeing deliberately appointed junior engineers who didn't know the right questions to ask to FAA delegate positions.
I will not buy that delegating to the company is fine. The only people who benefit from that are the companies. I don't give a damn about the convenience to someone incentivized to go and industrially produce the least safe air transport product they can get away with. I care about the public's safety given I already know the market selects for incentive setters that flirt with risk in dangerous ways. And yes, that means we, the public, should damn well pay for that regulatory edifice. Especially if the rest of the world will treat FAA certification with reciprocity.
The FAA cert of airworthiness just confirms that this tail number was build exactly to type design, or, if required, anything that didn't went through non-conformance (say someone accidentally drilled a hole in the wrong spot and engineers had to decide if that compromised type design, mitigate it if needed, document it, and include documentation on all that with the tail number). There is no malice here this position/certification doesn't do what you seem to think it does.
You salary concern is wrong too. Aviation is a small world. The QA person has to be approved by the FAA to have a job. Boeing can threaten a paycheck, the FAA a career. Boeing is also Union in Seattle.
But again you should not be asking questions at this level just confirming the tail number was manufactured exactly to type design. You should be doing type design checks, that were approved as part of the type design process, and signed off and approved by the FAA. If the system requires someone to be an aerospace engineer level asking smart question during this phase, the entire FAA system failed and it wouldn't matter if FAA was on site or not. This is 1-2 filing cabinets worth of documentation that checks were performed and everything conformed to type. Documenting/verifying every part's serialized number in case of grounding/recall. That assemblies were assembled in the type design specified order, not the faster way Bob on the floor came up with (I think this was the problem with the doors, contractors not doing to type design and type design not requiring auditing in a way that caught that). Stuff like that.
Btw for context, back in the 90s, a senior FAA official (I think a Director) had said something along the lines of “The FAA does not and cannot check everything, we just see that companies are doing their tests.”
> >You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc.
> Incorrect. The engineers acting as FAA delegates are paid by Boeing, not the FAA. Toxic incentive. Stop shining that apple Leroy, plane needs to get shipped, and bossman is getting testy.
I wasn't talking about who gets paid by whom. I meant whether the FAA is putting out openings for regulatory/engineering people, and what kind of people Boeing is hiring.
> MCAS was deliberately designed against industry best practices and perception managed from regulators to do everything possible to avoid simulator training. Stop assuming good faith.
I never said Boeing was in good faith. My report (based off the excellent NTSB/DOT report significantly, if anyone wants to delve in depth) was pretty much about that.
> I will not buy that delegating to the company is fine. The only people who benefit from that are the companies. I don't give a damn about the convenience to someone incentivized to go and industrially produce the least safe air transport product they can get away with. I care about the public's safety given I already know the market selects for incentive setters that flirt with risk in dangerous ways. And yes, that means we, the public, should damn well pay for that regulatory edifice. Especially if the rest of the world will treat FAA certification with reciprocity.
I fully agree. Got a better solution/alternative in mind that's feasible?
(Disclaimer, I'm not from the US if that is of any importance.)
The latter is a much better system to find issues than the former, you get a chance to see a lot more issues when your actively working on the systems where the issues would be than if your walking around and looking at paperwork.
And, FWIW, the type of person who ends up self-selecting into this kind of work are serious people who deeply care about airline safety. It is a rather thankless job with a lot of onerous, tedious paperwork that is not very sexy.
They could have IT set legal hold on email accounts, filesystems, PLM/MLM, etc and only us in IT and them knew, not even higher management. They could scrap $20,000 parts. It's also a small world, so chances are your internal people worked with the FAA person (who could be a consultant or full time FAA employee) at a past job so people know if trust levels are warranted.
There's also a whole other layer of oversite people might not realize. The company's insurance company (think Lloyd’s). They will have their own people who will come do on sites as well and do pretty intensive audits of everything from engineering through production.
Did Boeing implement internal and process changes to justify this? That's an actual question, if they did this step would make sense.
I want to trust Boeing to do the right thing when it comes to safety. As is, I still prefer Airbus when I get a choice.
Better pack a toxic fume respirator in your carry-on:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/delta-engines-airbus-toxic-fume...
I have heard absolutely nothing about Boeing that suggests that anything meaningful has changed at all there.
Even if this was a sound practical decision surely they can see how it's radioactive for their(FAA) reputation?
1. Build product people like
2. Build competitive moat
3. Extract maximum value by raising prices or spending less.
4. When the value proposition becomes negative for the end user, then legislate your business' continued profits and existence.
6. Get acquired by private equity through an LBO.
7. Become even worse.
A more charitable explanation is that their resources are more limited than the mess Boeing have created and they can't be everywhere at once. The idea that boeing have earned back trust is laughable to me.
Ot but mentour pilot on youtube does an excellent job of explaining how insanely safety focused the airline industry is and has plenty of boeing analysis as well.
I know multiple nations fleets (not at the airbus/boeing level) were chosen based on kickbacks. I know we were the originally winning bid, but that it was not extended to us because we wouldn't do kickbacks (they are illegal for US companies but at the time not for Europeans). Personally I'd rather the fly on the best aircraft not the one that inflated the price a half million per plane and sent those extra millions back to the government officials the picked the airframe.
Is that the one crashing down from the sky every few months?
I guess the FAA can do all they want, let’s see how the UE validates it now.
Or maybe Trump can help by withdrawing from ICAO? /s
That said, money didn't go great for Boeing either after the last batch of people died.
I have a hard time not imagining that the engineering culture at Boeing is not just as moribund as it was.
The ones I have worked with have no problem telling management to go pound sand when they are pushing schedule.
No way I'm flying Boeing again.
many Engineer concern is ignore by management because it cost them something, greed to max