[conspire] 737 MAX story keeps getting more fractally bad

[Rick Moen]

Here's another set of tidbits from just how damaging the post-2003 
'self-certification' neutering of FAA oversight has been:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/engineers-say-boeing-pushed-to-limit-safety-testing-in-race-to-certify-planes-including-737-max/

  In 2016, as Boeing raced to get the 737 MAX certified by the Federal
  Aviation Administration (FAA), a senior company engineer whose job was
  to act on behalf of the FAA balked at Boeing management demands for less
  stringent testing of the fire-suppression system around the jet’s new
  LEAP engines.

  [RM summary:  The senior engineer got all his certification engineers
  to agree and fight for his position, and temporarily prevail, but a
  few weeks later was reassigned.]

Incident became well known inside Boeing as a cautionary tale about how
insisting on safety when management wanted a fast schedule and low costs
would be a career-limiting move.

Shortly after that, FAA and Boeing fundamentally reworked how oversight
worked, doing even bigger damage.  Previously:  FAA would appoint a
Boeing engineer as Designated Engineering Representative (DER) for a
program, who would report to technical counterparts at FAA.  FAA would
then review and sign off on resulting certification work.  Now:  Boeing
would appoint a Boeing engineer as Authorized Representative (AR), who
would report to Boeing managers.  Boeing managers would then decide what
reports to send to FAA, on the basis of which FAA would do certification
work.

This change exposed ARs pressure from management, strips them of
protection, gives Boeing managers more opportunity to push for
shortcuts, and deprives FAA of most opportunities for oversight.
(The newspaper article cites five examples of Boeing muscling ARs
to get them to sign off on unsafe work or lose their job, including
one who was outright summarily dismissed from employment for not finding
ways to immediately find a repair in compliance.)

As _Seattle Times_ noted, Trump toady and ex-lobbyist FAA Acting
Administrator Daniel Elwell advised the Senate Transportation Committee
in March that FAA could take airframe certification back in-house and
terminate 'self-certification' if Congress would give FAA 10,000 more
employees and another $1.8b for the certification office, but the real
issue is why ARs are no longer appointed by and reporting to FAA
technical staff, as under the old DER system, rather than being
completely under the thumb of the manufacturers, as they have been for
the past few years.

(This is the same Daniel Elwell who had no idea Boeing had been
knowingly shipping the high-priced AoA Disagree option in
non-operational mode since 2017 on units lacking the separate AoA
Indicator until he read about that on May 5, 2019 in the _Wall Street
Journal_.)

And, as the _Times_ also notes, FAA's current proposal, in a report
co-authored in 2012 by a Boeing representative, is to go in the exact
opposite direction, fully delegating certification to Boeing, so that
Boeing engineers would simply decide that their designs were safe
without even theoretical FAA oversight, as part of what is to be called
a Certified Design Organization, or CDO, that would exist wholly within
Boeing.