BA Boeing Co

By Andy Pasztor and Andrew Tangel 

Federal investigators and lawmakers are asking the same question about Boeing Co.'s 737 MAX jet: Did U.S. safety regulators rigorously follow longstanding engineering and design standards in approving a suspect stall-prevention feature?

Officials from the Justice Department and the Transportation Department inspector general's office are looking into how Boeing developed the aircraft, which has been involved in two fatal crashes within five months. The inspector general's office is also scrutinizing whether the Federal Aviation Administration took any shortcuts compromising safety, people familiar with the matter said. Boeing was eager to complete the design and certification process as quickly as possible, according to people who were involved.

Boeing has said the FAA certified the 737 MAX according to identical requirements and processes for previous airplanes after a six-year, methodical development.

House and Senate committees are separately gearing up to grill senior FAA leaders next month about many of the same issues, focusing on the stall-prevention system, which was created for the 737 MAX but not highlighted in pilot manuals or training.

Canada's transport minister, Marc Garneau, said Monday the government would conduct its own certification of Boeing's promised software modification to the stall-prevention system, even if it is certified by the FAA.

Mr. Garneau also said Canada is reviewing its original decision in 2017 to allow 737 MAX jets to fly in that country's airspace, effectively replicating the FAA's safety approval. Canada last week grounded the plane shortly before it was idled in the U.S.

"We're going to review the validation that we did at that time," Mr. Garneau said in Ottawa. "We may not change anything but we've decided that it's a good idea for us to review" the decision.

Such a move is highly unusual, especially for a close U.S. air-safety partner such as Canada, because governments world-wide almost always accept the decision of the country where an aircraft is manufactured. But as in the unilateral grounding of 737 MAX jets earlier this month by a host of regulators overseas, the FAA's influence regarding the MAX fleet has been waning.

The U.S. Transportation Department inquiry has included questions about the aircraft's design, how training was devised and whether safety was compromised in favor of business concerns, a person familiar with the details said.

The FAA said the plane was approved to carry passengers as part of the agency's "standard certification process," which the agency said is "well established and (has) consistently produced safe aircraft." The agency declined to comment on various decisions regarding specific systems.

The Justice Department and the Transportation Department's inspector general declined to comment.

A Boeing spokesman on Sunday said the Chicago-based company wouldn't respond to questions on legal matters or governmental inquiries. The spokesman didn't respond to requests to comment on Monday.

As The Wall Street Journal reported earlier, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., issued a broad subpoena dated March 11 to at least one person involved in the 737 MAX's development, seeking related documents, including correspondence, emails and other messages.

Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon, the Democratic chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said his panel would delve into how the plane was developed and approved. "We're going to investigate why retraining was not required," Mr. DeFazio said in an interview after the FAA grounded the planes last week. "What kind of pressure was applied or not applied?"

Interviews with former government and industry safety experts, however, highlight potential areas where analyses of the stall-prevention system, dubbed MCAS, might have deviated from the FAA's typical safety-review process.

An important element of the Transportation Department review, these officials said, is expected to be whether the FAA and Boeing complied fully with traditional FAA design requirements for systems that are essential to the safety of an aircraft.

Over the years, the agency has mandated the use of a formal, structured approach to determine how a specific piece of equipment or system failure should be categorized and scrutinized.

Under the FAA's process, systems that entail significant hazards and potential loss of life if they go haywire are generally put into two categories: those that have an "improbable" risk of failure and those with an "extremely improbable" risk of failure.

"Improbable" essentially means the part or system is unlikely to fail during the lifetime of any individual airplane, according to FAA documents and industry officials. An "extremely improbable" failure is deemed so rare that it is unlikely to occur during the lifetime of an entire fleet of aircraft.

Boeing, these officials said, apparently persuaded the FAA that MCAS wouldn't have to meet the more-rigorous of those standards, partly because a misfire could be counteracted by pilots simply turning off the entire system.

A spokesman for Boeing said: "The FAA considered the final configuration and operating parameters of MCAS during MAX certification, and concluded that it met all certification and regulatory requirements."

The need for MCAS arose as Boeing was creating the MAX, because its large, fuel-efficient engines jutted forward in a way those on earlier 737 models hadn't. That shifted the plane's balance, tipping its nose up and making it tougher to fly in certain conditions than the 737s that pilots world-wide knew how to handle. To help pilots manage that difference, Boeing added a powerful new stall-prevention system.

That solution, the stall-prevention system known as MCAS, was designed to push the plane's nose down in certain conditions to avoid the aircraft stalling, a loss of aerodynamic lift that can result when a plane is climbing too steeply or with too little power, leading to an uncontrolled plunge. But MCAS is now under scrutiny after investigators determined pilots in the October crash of Lion Air Flight 610 battled the system during the 11-minute flight. U.S. and other authorities grounded the MAX after initial data from this month's crash of a second jetliner, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, pointed to potential similarities with the Indonesian accident.

Boeing designed MCAS to rely on data from a single sensor that measures the angle of the plane's nose, known as the angle of attack. The idea was that a single sensor, rather than two, would be simpler, a person familiar with the matter has said, and would be in line with Boeing's long-held design philosophy of keeping the pilot at the center of cockpit control.

But Boeing's design of the system puzzled some former employees, safety experts and regulators. They saw it as a departure from the company's typical practice of relying on multiple sensors to reduce the risk of systems misfiring based on erroneous data from a single faulty sensor.

"It seems odd given Boeing's traditions," said Frank McCormick, a former Boeing flight-controls engineer who went on to be a consultant to regulators and manufacturers on matters including how such systems are designed. "It's not just as conservative as would have been the norm in the old Boeing."

A Boeing spokesman said "design, development and certification was consistent with our approach to previous new and derivative airplane designs."

If the FAA had decided differently, a former regulator and an industry air-safety expert said, Boeing probably would have been forced to go with a design for MCAS that relied on two sensors, instead of just one. An FAA document specifies that the possibility of a given system failing cannot be designated "extremely improbable" if it could result from a single faulty compon

An air-safety expert with decades of safety work and accident-investigation experience criticized the notion that the person flying the plane could provide the ultimate backstop in case MCAS malfunctioned, saying: "A pilot only provides a redundant safeguard if he or she has been properly trained to understand the system."

Since the Lion Air crash, Boeing has emphasized that an existing procedure that pilots are trained to follow would turn off the stall-prevention system.

--Siobhan Hughes and Kim Mackrael contributed to this article.

Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 18, 2019 20:00 ET (00:00 GMT)

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