FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker acknowledged Thursday that his agency had been “inadequate” in overseeing fighter jet Boeing ahead of a mid-air incident earlier this year with Alaska Airlines — and that it focused too much on checking paperwork .
“We should have had a better handle on what was going on” at Boeing, Whitaker immediately told reporters after a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the FAA’s oversight of Boeing.
During the hearing, Whitaker told senators that the FAA not only had a light touch with Boeing as a regulator, but was also “too focused on paperwork audits and not enough on inspections.”
But Whitaker assured senators that the FAA has “changed that approach in recent months” and promised that the changes “are permanent.”
That the FAA was too focused on overseeing Boeing-produced paperwork rather than conducting its own inspections echoes criticism leveled in 2019 after two 737 MAX 8 planes crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
During the hearing, chair Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) cited news reports suggesting there were dozens of instances at Boeing and its fuselage contractor Spirit AeroSystems where procedures and products did not meet FAA standards. But Cantwell also criticized the FAA for relying too much on audits — and what she suggested was a tendency not to take steps to change things, even when those audits revealed problems.
“In 2022 and 2023, as part of individualized FAA audits of Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems, the production lines required Boeing to correct all identified issues,” Cantwell said. Spirit Aero has also been in the spotlight for shoddy work that led to defective aircraft being transferred to Boeing’s production facility in Renton.
“Yet your new special audit still encountered problems. It raises the question about the audit process itself at the FAA,” she said.
A substantial portion of the law that Congress passed shortly after the MAX crashes of 2018 and 2019 was aimed at ensuring that the FAA does not delegate too much authority to certify aircraft to manufacturers like Boeing. But on Thursday, Cantwell said Boeing must correct its problems: “we need both certification and production oversight going forward.
Whitaker said Boeing’s problems are likely the result of a “long evolution,” exacerbated by workforce challenges brought on by the pandemic, where too few eyes reinforced the need for craftsmanship and quality.
But he couldn’t speak to the exact causes, noting that he wasn’t FAA chief until last fall.
The agency rotated through a number of acting administrators for 18 months until he was confirmed; but his predecessor, former Delta Air Lines executive Steve Dickson, also had to deal with the fallout from Boeing’s latest crisis, in which two MAX crashes claimed the lives of 346 on board foreign airlines.
Since the Alaska incident, the FAA has just over 20 inspectors overseeing Boeing’s work while assessing how Boeing is implementing its action plan – a requirement the FAA has placed on Boeing that includes a range of improvements in the area of internal audits, employee training, quality control and production processes in the company.
With inspectors expected on Boeing factory floors in the near future, Cantwell also said she expects Whitaker to assess whether the agency needs more help down the road. Whitaker said the FAA’s estimated goal is to one day have 55 inspectors.
“We have now moved to a more active model plus audit inspection approach, which will allow the FAA to gain better visibility into operations,” Whitaker said. “I will remain personally involved to ensure they make the necessary changes to transform safety culture and address production quality issues.”
