Shaw S Hunter
Established Member
More importantly, nor can the FAA! The major western industrial nation's certifying authorities have been happy to endorse each other's approvals of equipment. The 737 MAX debacle has demonstrated that not only has a major manufacturer cut corners with safety in the interest of profit, but far more alarmingly, an erstwhile globally respected watchdog has knelt at the altar of commercial pressure and failed in its primary duty. The loss of Boeing's credibility is unfortunate for those in the company who are committed to excellence and honesty within the organisation but in the final analysis it is just a commercial failure through misjudgement.
The FAA is a government agency and has been shown to be unfit for purpose. Even if heads roll there, other certifying responsible authorities will insist on local verification. It is the loss of trust that will undermine the US aircraft industry, - even for domestic sales.
While the FAA has clearly been deficient some of that is due to years, decades even, of government pressure to reduce funding of that organisation which arguably goes back to the aftermath of a major Air Traffic Controllers' strike during the Reagan administration. So while Congress will happily jump on the FAA-bashing bandwagon it too has a degree of culpability due to its lack of properly diligent oversight. And then factor in the lobbyists...
It would be interesting to know if anything similar has happened with the Airbus NEO family, with the self certification of modifications to them.
Although does Airbus's experience of making the entire A320 family and A330 and A340 single type ratings make them possibly more aware of the risks in that sort of endeavour?
While the comparison is an obvious one to make the reality is that the A320 and A330/340 families were designed as fly-by-wire (FBW) from the very outset so making adjustments to on-board flight computing is much easier and the testing/proving of such changes much more reliable. None of that is true of the Boeing 737 whose basic design is over 50 years old ie pre-dates any useful on-board computing other than found in the space programme. Hindsight is always a wonderful thing but Boeing really should have come up with a clean sheet design to replace the 737 as soon as the Next Gen series were in production.