FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again

“You can no longer certify aircraft of this design as safe” seems a reasonable response to a design flaw causing multiple crashes. My question would be whether the design flaws have been addressed. If not, then allowing them to keep making and certifying them does turn the whole exercise into a piece of theatre. Unfortunately, it’s a totally believable decision for some bureaucracies.

Doesn't directly answer your question, but the CNBC article appears to be correct. See https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-statement-boeing-airworthin...

> The FAA stopped allowing Boeing to issue airworthiness certificates for 737 MAX airplanes in 2019 during their return to service following the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, and for Boeing 787 airplanes in 2022 because of production quality issues.

The issue was actually the door plug scandal. It showed that Boeing's QC was compromised in their factory and they were not able to properly certify that the aircraft were being built as designed.

As an aside this a long talked-about problem with the South Carolina factory, that the place does not follow aerospace standards and practices. The door plug failure was the highest profile QC miss out of that factory.

>So what was the point of suspending Boeing's authority to do those inspections?

Disclaimer: I used to work in airworthiness certification as well as maintenance and design modification engineering for the C-130, but not for any of the Boeing products.

You're generally correct. In layperson's terms, the Type Certificate is like the blueprint or the spec, and the individual airworthiness certificates are a certification that each aircraft coming off the assembly line is in conformance with the approved type design.

When the MCAS debacle happened, the FAA mandated a change to the type design, and further mandated embodiment of that design change through an Airworthiness Directive. This is the part that addressed the MCAS hazard condition. When they withheld Boeing's authority to issue certificates what that really gave them was, at the airframe serial number level, the ability to ensure that the modifications had been embodied correctly.

You're right that that final certification has little to do with correcting the underlying MCAS design flaw on the 737, but there were also quality issues with the 787, and because Boeing's in-house ODA issues those certificates acting as the FAA itself, and those certifications are essentially the last hurdle before delivery of the aircraft (and thus the last hurdle before revenue coming into Boeing's coffers), the FAA withheld that authority so that Boeing employees could not be unduly pressured by management's perverse incentives. Somebody elsewhere in these comments posted the OIG report that briefly touches on this pressure.

In fewer words, it was about ensuring independence in final airworthiness release, and ensuring Boeing's ODA could not be pressured by management who subscribe to the Jack Welch school of ethics.

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Edited to add:

There is a valid argument to be made that the FAA didn't handle this situation correctly/adequately. For context, in aerospace when we identify that a hazard condition exists we classify both the severity and the likelihood of occurrence. So for example depending on the organization's risk acceptance matrix, one might have a hazard with high severity but extremely low chance of occurrence, and that might be considered acceptably safe (or not!).

The FAA now says that the back-and-forth they have been doing over the last however many months produced comparable production-quality findings regardless of which organization issued the certificates (Boeing's ODA or the FAA itself).

As best I could tell at the time this issue was a hot topic, when it withheld Boeing's issuance authority the FAA never clearly articulated:

- Which risks it was controlling,

- How much risk reduction it expected,

- What data would demonstrate effectiveness, and

- What objective conditions would permit termination of the withholding

So again, there's an argument that the FAA just sort of decided that they now have that Warm Fuzzy and everything is fine.

Consumers are indeed very concerned... that they be able to purchase £49 tickets on RyanAir.

The #1 rule of marketing is that people's actions rarely line up with what they say they're going to do.

Toyota had the largest recall in history for the unintended acceleration debacle. Yes, lots of people were saying they'd never set foot in a toyota again. Now people don't even remember it.

> Honestly, back when the 737 MAX debacle happened, a lot of consumers claimed that they would stop flying aircrafts if they ran into 737 MAXs. And I don't think it happened in enough numbers - or even enough to make news. Sales went through the roof, everything kept working.

Is this kind of consumer revolt even really possible?

If you feel strongly enough that you refuse to fly altogether, then of course you can avoid flying on a 737 MAX. But I think most people did not feel the risk was that high. They just want to select "guarantee no 737 MAX" when booking a flight, and as far as I can tell that option doesn't exist.

Even if the flight is not a 737 MAX when you book, they can and sometimes do change aircraft, and as far as I know there's no option to get your money back when they do. If you show up and see it's a 737 MAX...you either get on or you lose your money, and have to find some other way to get where you're going, right?

Honestly they kinda screwed over people -- like me -- who tried to avoid the MAX planes for a while. I'd specifically book around the MAX planes and then they would change equipment at the last minute into a MAX. There is no meaningful "knob" an aviation consumer can turn to express an aircraft preference, and given how US airspace works, you often don't have a meaningful choice in carrier (unless you're willing to take on extra stops).

In Europe "no 737 MAX" basically means "no Ryanair". Depending on how you feel about Ryanair, avoiding the 737 MAX can be very easy.

In other places, like the US, they may not be practical to avoid.

I have avoided flying on a 737 MAX and have even asked about it at gates when a plane was switched.

Part of the problem though is that many, many, many routes were straight up removed during and after COVID and still haven't returned. There is often no choice, particularly with certain companies like Southwest. However, I haven't flown Southwest since I learned that they were basically complicit, if not directly involved, in Boeing's 737 MAX issues.

This is accurate, except “recertify” is the wrong verb. This is about signing off on individual airplanes.

Why?

I don't go that far and I'm not exactly scared to fly on a Boeing (because statistically it's still very safe, I ride motorbikes which is probably 100x more dangerous etc etc).

However I definitely prefer flying on an Airbus, put it that way

I was just going to say this. Post-MD management disasters like the 737 NG Ducommun scandal that barely anyone knows about and nothing was done to rectify poor quality "approved" structural parts and mishandled assembly line installation doesn't win confidence in the flying inventory.

This is not exactly the same thing, this isn't Boeing being allowed to sign off on their design -- this is only the airworthiness certificate which means "this particular airplane we just built follows the spec which was already otherwise approved".

Let's see if the EU shows some backbone or not.

Can you explain exactly why this is bad?

I have read that self-issuance of airworthiness certificates has been normal since the 1950s. Given that, I don't think the issue is due to regulatory corruption but an issue at Boeing which has (hopefully) been resolved.

That isn't what the problem with the 737 MAX was.