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Cozy ties between Boeing and U.S. regulators draw scrutiny The latest
safety lapse at Boeing renews concerns about the company's influence
in Washington and whether federal regulators have delegated too much
of their oversight authority to its employees.

National

'Cozy' relationship between Boeing and the U.S. draws scrutiny amid
737 Max 9 mess

January 19, 20245:00 AM ET
Joel Rose

Joel Rose

'Cozy' relationship between Boeing and the U.S. draws scrutiny amid
737 Max 9 mess

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[gettyimage]
Enlarge this image

Then-President Barack Obama walks down the stairs of a Boeing 787
Dreamliner at the company's production facility in Everett, Wash., in
2012. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Then-President Barack Obama walks down the stairs of a Boeing 787
Dreamliner at the company's production facility in Everett, Wash., in
2012.

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

When he was still the president of the United States, Barack Obama
joked about having another job on the side: salesman in chief.

"I'm expecting a gold watch from Boeing at the end of my presidency,
because I know that I'm on the list of top salesmen at Boeing," Obama
deadpanned in 2013.

Boeing is no ordinary company. It's a pillar of the U.S. economy,
both as a military contractor and in civil aviation. It claims to be
the country's largest exporter.

But the longstanding special relationship between the U.S. government
and Boeing has come under growing scrutiny, particularly after two
crashes involving Boeing's 737 Max 8 plane, in 2018 and 2019. Those
tragedies prompted significant changes, with a new CEO at Boeing and
revamped oversight rules at the Federal Aviation Administration.

Now the latest safety incident involving a Boeing jet, the 737 Max 9,
is raising difficult questions about whether that response went far
enough.

Amid scrutiny, Boeing promises more quality checks. But is it enough?

Business

Amid scrutiny, Boeing promises more quality checks. But is it enough?

Investigators are still trying to determine why a panel blew off an
Alaska Airlines jet in midair earlier this month. Federal regulators
have grounded 171 Max 9 planes with similar configurations, while
launching a review of Boeing's manufacturing and production lines.

The head of the FAA says it's time to reexamine the longtime practice
of delegating some of the agency's oversight responsibilities to
Boeing employees, raising the possibility of moving some of those
duties to a third party.

That would be a remarkable shift in how the federal government
regulates a company that is an icon of American industry and
innovation.

The U.S. helps Boeing sell planes overseas

Boeing's importance to the economy extends far beyond the more than
140,000 people that it employs directly. The company also supports a
network of suppliers and contractors that reaches across the country.

"Small businesses are up and down the supply chain," Obama said at
the same meeting of the President's Export Council where he joked
about earning a gold watch from Boeing. "And when we sell a bunch of
airplanes, a lot of small businesses and medium-sized businesses are
benefiting from that as well."

Obama isn't the only president to act as a cheerleader for Boeing.

"God bless you, may God bless the United States of America, and God
bless Boeing," then-President Donald Trump said during a 2017 visit
to a plant in South Carolina where the company builds its 787
Dreamliner.

When it comes to civil aviation, Boeing has no rivals based in the
U.S. Its primary competitor, Airbus, is headquartered in Europe,
though it does build some planes here.

[gettyimage]
Enlarge this image

Investigators are still trying to determine why a panel known as a
door plug blew off this Boeing 737 Max 9 jet earlier this month.
National Transportation Safety Board via Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption
National Transportation Safety Board via Getty Images

Investigators are still trying to determine why a panel known as a
door plug blew off this Boeing 737 Max 9 jet earlier this month.

National Transportation Safety Board via Getty Images

Still, U.S. leaders are willing to put a finger on the scale in
Boeing's favor.

The federal government has an official credit agency, the
Export-Import Bank of the United States, that extends financing for
overseas buyers. It's sometimes described as "Boeing's bank," because
the company is such a big beneficiary.

The U.S. government is, in a literal sense, helping Boeing sell
planes overseas -- and these days, that largely means the 737 Max
series. It is the company's best-selling plane, with thousands of
pending orders, and is seen as crucial to Boeing's financial future.

None of this is supposed to affect how regulators at the FAA treat
the company. But in the real world, Boeing wields a lot of power and
influence in Washington.

"Boeing evidently does think it's too big to fail," Jim Hall, a
former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in
a recent interview.

"It's not complicated. In Washington, D.C., as everyone knows, there
is a great deal of influence exercised through fundraising to members
of Congress," Hall said. "There's a great coziness or familiarity
between all of the parties. And so, who's the bad cop?"

737 Max 8 crashes reveal systemic problems

[lionair_cu]
Enlarge this image

Officials in Jakarta, Indonesia, inspect an engine recovered in
November 2018 from a Boeing 737 Max 8 flown by Indonesia's Lion Air
that crashed. Achmad Ibrahim/AP hide caption

toggle caption
Achmad Ibrahim/AP

Officials in Jakarta, Indonesia, inspect an engine recovered in
November 2018 from a Boeing 737 Max 8 flown by Indonesia's Lion Air
that crashed.

Achmad Ibrahim/AP

Ties between the U.S. government and Boeing came under intense
criticism after the 2018 and 2019 crashes involving the company's 737
Max 8 planes. A total of 346 people were killed.

After the first crash, of a Lion Air jet in Indonesia, Boeing
maintained that the pilots were mostly to blame. Five months later,
an Ethiopian Airlines plane went down under very similar
circumstances.

Regulators in many other countries immediately moved to ground the
Boeing Max 8. But the Federal Aviation Administration waited several
days, making it one of the last agencies to take that step.

Congressional Inquiry Faults Boeing And FAA Failures For Deadly 737
Max Plane Crashes

National

Congressional Inquiry Faults Boeing And FAA Failures For Deadly 737
Max Plane Crashes

When congressional investigators started digging into what caused the
crashes, they found a range of problems at Boeing -- both with the
design of the Max 8's flight control systems, and with pilot training
-- and they found insufficient oversight by the FAA.

At a dramatic hearing in October 2019, family members held up
photographs of the crash victims while Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg
testified.

"We can and must do better. We've been challenged and changed by
these accidents," Muilenburg told members of Congress.

One of the parents in the hearing room that day was Nadia Milleron,
whose daughter Samya Stumo was killed in the second crash. Milleron
confronted Boeing's CEO after the hearing.

"I asked him to resign, because I said that he made decisions which
killed people, and then he refused to acknowledge it," she told NPR's
Morning Edition in an interview at the time.

"Our daughter got on the plane completely trusting," Milleron said.
"And she never dreamed that there would be any problem with the plane
itself, and there was a huge problem."

Muilenburg was pushed out of his job just a few months later.

[muilenburg]
Enlarge this image

Then-Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg (center foreground) prepares to
testify during an Oct. 29, 2019, hearing on Capitol Hill as family
members hold up photographs of those killed in the Ethiopian Airlines
Flight 302 and Lion Air Flight 610 crashes. Andrew Harnik/AP hide
caption

toggle caption
Andrew Harnik/AP

Then-Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg (center foreground) prepares to
testify during an Oct. 29, 2019, hearing on Capitol Hill as family
members hold up photographs of those killed in the Ethiopian Airlines
Flight 302 and Lion Air Flight 610 crashes.

Andrew Harnik/AP

"A case study of the complete and total failure of self-regulation"

Congressional hearings on the design and certification of the 737 Max
8 also brought to light some troubling internal emails from Boeing
employees, who mocked their colleagues as well as regulators at the
FAA.

"This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by
monkeys," one employee wrote.

Another Boeing employee wrote that a presentation for regulators was
"like dogs watching TV," because the regulators didn't understand
what they were seeing.

Boeing Employees Mocked FAA In Internal Messages Before 737 Max
Disasters

Business

Boeing Employees Mocked FAA In Internal Messages Before 737 Max
Disasters

Investigators learned that Boeing had hidden key details about the
737 Max 8's flight control systems from regulators before they signed
off on the plane's design.

They also found that FAA regulators had determined after the first
crash that the Max 8 was likely to have the same problem again, but
did not make those calculations public at the time.

That brought harsh criticism from safety advocates and Democrats on
Capitol Hill.

"We must reexamine the current system that allowed for a much too
cozy relationship between regulators and companies, including
Boeing," then-Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., said at a hearing in 2020.

"This continues to be a case study of the complete and total failure
of self-regulation," Udall said. "And I think this will go down as
one of the big mistakes in history in this area."

A long history of delegating oversight to industry

The FAA has delegated some of its oversight authority to
manufacturers since the 1950s. But regulators have come to rely more
and more on Boeing over time, as its planes have gotten more complex
and supply chains have grown longer.

This pattern accelerated in the early 2000s, says Peter Robison, an
investigative reporter for Bloomberg News and the author of Flying
Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing.

Regulators at the FAA were pushed by the bosses to hand off more work
to Boeing, Robison says -- partly because they trusted that Boeing
engineers knew the planes best and partly because it was cheaper for
the FAA.

What the 737 Max 9 incident says about the broader culture at Boeing

"What I traced was a distortion in the relationship where the
regulator came to feel almost that it worked for Boeing," Robison
told NPR's Here and Now earlier this month. "The managers worked very
closely with Boeing to speed production of planes. And the managers
at the FAA really came to treat Boeing as its customer rather than
the flying public as the people it was serving."

At the same time, Robison says, the corporate culture at Boeing was
changing too, becoming more focused on profit and less on quality.

Max 8 crashes prompt sweeping changes

After the Max 8 tragedies, Congress passed bipartisan legislation
aimed at preventing the company or the FAA from repeating the
mistakes that led to the deadly crashes. The FAA made changes that
were supposed to tighten up how its authority is delegated.

A new CEO took over at Boeing, pledging to restore the company's
commitment to quality and safety.

After nearly two years, regulators cleared the Max 8 to begin flying
again, and Boeing began trying to rebuild its reputation with
airlines and the flying public.

2 major airlines find loose bolts, other problems on grounded Boeing
jets

National

2 major airlines find loose bolts, other problems on grounded Boeing
jets

Then came Jan. 5, 2024, when a panel known as a door plug blew off a
Boeing jet -- this time a 737 Max 9 -- at 16,000 feet, raising
troubling questions for the company and the FAA once again.

There are several key differences between the Alaska Airlines
incident and the Max 8 crashes.

No one was killed or seriously injured last month, although NTSB
investigators said the incident could have been much worse had it had
occurred at a higher altitude. And while the cause of the latest
incident is still under investigation, it appears to be a problem in
the manufacturing process, not a design flaw.

Still, Boeing's critics see a troubling similarity between the
events. The company once again appears to be putting the bottom line
ahead of safety, they say, by rushing planes off the factory floor at
the rate of more than one per day.

This time, however, Boeing has moved quickly to own up to its
mistake.

"This event can never happen again," CEO Dave Calhoun said at an
all-hands meeting last week at a factory near Seattle. He told
employees: "We're gonna approach this -- No. 1 -- acknowledging our
mistake. We are gonna approach it with 100% and complete transparency
every step of the way."

The reaction of the FAA has been different, too. This time,
regulators moved quickly to ground all 737 Max 9 jets with door
plugs. And they seem to be in no rush to recertify those planes to
fly again.

Another look at how oversight is delegated

The FAA says it's now considering even bigger changes to the way it
regulates Boeing.

"It is time to reexamine the delegation of authority and assess any
associated safety risks," FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said last
week. "The grounding of the 737-9 and the multiple production-related
issues identified in recent years require us to look at every option
to reduce risk."

The FAA is tightening oversight of Boeing and will audit production
of the 737 Max 9

National

The FAA is tightening oversight of Boeing and will audit production
of the 737 Max 9

Regulators say they will consider whether to move quality oversight
and inspections to an independent third party.

That would be a major shift in the relationship between the FAA and
Boeing -- one that some safety advocates say is long overdue.

"This is a very smart move by the FAA," said David Soucie, a former
FAA safety inspector and the author of the book Why Planes Crash.
"The drive for profitability may just be overriding this ability to
have an independent delegation within the organization."

It's a difficult moment for the FAA and Whitaker, who took over as
administrator just a few months ago. FAA safety inspectors cannot
inspect every bolt on every plane that leaves the Boeing factory. But
business as usual at the agency no longer seems like a good option
either.

What's at stake is how the FAA regulates one of the biggest companies
in the aviation industry -- and in the entire U.S. economy.

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