The U.S. House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released its highly critical report as the aerospace company continues efforts to bring the 737 MAX planes back to the skies after they were all grounded in March of Last year.
The decision to remove them from service followed the demise of Vol 302 d’Ethiopian Airlines outside of Addis Ababa.
All 157 on board were killed.
Six months earlier, a Lion Air The 737 MAX, carrying 189 passengers and crew, crashed in Indonesia.
The report focused on development activities at Boeing and on scrutiny by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after official accident reports blamed flight control software for both crashes.
He accused the aircraft manufacturer of not disclosing crucial information to the watchdog and pilots and said the FAA “had failed to ensure the safety of the traveling public.”
He said: “The accidents were not the result of a singular failure, a technical error or a badly managed event.
“They were the horrific culmination of a series of flawed technical assumptions on the part of Boeing engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing management, and clearly insufficient oversight by the FAA. “
The report detailed a series of issues with the aircraft’s design and FAA approval.
The focus was on the flight control software, known as MCAS.
The investigative team uncovered “faulty design and performance assumptions” in the system, which was believed to help counter a tendency for the MAX to rise and could be activated by data from a single sensor.
The FAA, which has vowed to work with the committee to improve its oversight regime, remains the biggest hurdle as Boeing continues efforts to return the MAX fleet to service.
Boeing seeks clearance from US and EU regulators to return MAX fleet to service
Test flights were allowed to resume in June, but the regulator has since required additional design work.
The company has been forced to compensate airlines hit by the grounding as the global aviation industry is shrinking furiously to account for collapsing travel demand due to the coronavirus crisis.
Boeing’s total bill is in the tens of billions of dollars.
In a statement, the company said it had “learned a lot of hard lessons” from the mistakes it made.
