Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain exactly why this is bad?
[flagged]
Lazy Reddit style comments, do you ever contribute?
I look down the chain of these comments and looks like others had no problem
FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
61–70 of 131 posts
Re: FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would assume the poster is asking for a more detailed explanation of the implied connection between this and the plane crashes.
Well that is profoundly lazy. Here, put it into your favorite LLM: "Is there a suspected or established relationship between Boeing's self-certification and the 737 MAX crashes?" That will almost certainly link to the thousands of pages of Congressional, OIG, FAA testimony, investigation, and reporting. Does GP think Boeing's self-certification authority was revoked after the accidents just for funsies? By random cha…
I did, in fact, spend a bit of time trying to look this up, because as pointed out by other comments, it was not entirely clear what relationship this revocation (which is about inspecting built aircraft vs the design) had to do with the crashes (which were primarily the result of a faulty design). I didn't find a particularly illuminating summary other than maybe the investigation also turned up some other problems.
More to the point, the original poster was implying that there would be a relationship between the reinstatement of Boeing's self-certification and future crashes. Which I think would be worth some deeper analysis beyond 'corporations bad'.
Re: FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would assume the poster is asking for a more detailed explanation of the implied connection between this and the plane crashes.
Well that is profoundly lazy. Here, put it into your favorite LLM: "Is there a suspected or established relationship between Boeing's self-certification and the 737 MAX crashes?" That will almost certainly link to the thousands of pages of Congressional, OIG, FAA testimony, investigation, and reporting. Does GP think Boeing's self-certification authority was revoked after the accidents just for funsies? By random cha…
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Re: FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are confidently acting like you understand this process, while repeatedly confusing design certification (of the type) vs. airworthiness certification (of individual airplanes).
In the above OIG finding, can you please explain what "ODA" means? Maybe DOT OIG is confused? Big if true!
Yikes dude, you call me lazy. This is hilarious.
Re: FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would assume the poster is asking for a more detailed explanation of the implied connection between this and the plane crashes.
Well that is profoundly lazy. Here, put it into your favorite LLM: "Is there a suspected or established relationship between Boeing's self-certification and the 737 MAX crashes?" That will almost certainly link to the thousands of pages of Congressional, OIG, FAA testimony, investigation, and reporting. Does GP think Boeing's self-certification authority was revoked after the accidents just for funsies? By random cha…
I think using an LLM to confidently reply to online commenters is more profound, but I digress
Re: FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
#66> The U.S. government on Friday said Boeing can once again issue airworthiness certificates for its bestselling 737 Max aircraft and 787 Dreamliners, an authority that was stripped from the manufacturer after fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 of the 737 Max. I'm a bit confused by this. From what I've read an "airworthiness certificate" is not a certificate that the aircraft design is good and safe. That would be a type…
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.
SC wasn't really involved in this. The fuselage came from Spirit in Kansas, and final assembly happened in Renton.
Re: FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
#67> The U.S. government on Friday said Boeing can once again issue airworthiness certificates for its bestselling 737 Max aircraft and 787 Dreamliners, an authority that was stripped from the manufacturer after fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 of the 737 Max. I'm a bit confused by this. From what I've read an "airworthiness certificate" is not a certificate that the aircraft design is good and safe. That would be a type…
>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.
Re: FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
As has been noted in the actual reports, the crashes (as is true of all crashes) were the result of a specific chain of failures across several functions and organizations. One component of that chain of failures is the self-certification process. If the FAA had the resource and mandate to actually understand each aircraft design change, then it's very likely (not guaranteed, but very likely) that the MCAS design hav…
The addition of MCAS to the 737 MAX received type approval by the FAA in response to Boeing's documentation, not in response to anything Boeing approved or issued. No aircraft manufacturer has ever been allowed to issue a type certificate. The self-certification process (airworthiness certificates) is the manufacturer (rather than the regulator's inspectors) stating "this one specific aircraft with serial number ____…
No, an early, low-risk version of MCAS was proposed and given type approval by FAA. Then the MCAS design was changed iteratively and continuously without prompting another type approval process. Thenceforth, Boeing's ODA self-certification process was the only statutorily required step that could have caught that the post-type approval changes actually increased the risk significantly.
You should read the OIG report. It actually discusses all of this. It is absolutely possible an FAA cert would've missed the MCAS issue as well, but as OIG points out, one variable was significant commercial pressure on Boeing's ODA to approve the (iterated-since-type-approved)-MCAS. Presumably FAA staff would be less susceptible to this type of commercial pressure.
Re: FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
#69Re: FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the above OIG finding, can you please explain what "ODA" means? Maybe DOT OIG is confused? Big if true!
Nah, you can figure that out pretty easily yourself, and I get the sense your question is not in good faith. Earlier in this thread you called someone "profoundly lazy" for asking a less simple question. There are many types of designation in the system; your quote above is _not_ about Production Certification ODA staff (which this article is about), and indeed there is no world where Production Certification ODA wou…
You should go read the OIG report. Kind of a bummer because they put all this work into a document that you're just sitting here exemplifying the exact misunderstanding that they found as the major issue.