Flawed analysis, failed oversight: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

As Boeing hustled in 2015 to catch up to Airbus and certify its new 737 MAX, FAA managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the resulting analysis. But the original safety analysis that Boeing delivered to the FAA for a new flight control system on the MAX had several crucial flaws. That flight control system, called MCAS (Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System), is now under scrutiny after 2 crashes of the jet in less than 5 months resulted in Wednesday’s FAA order to ground the plane. Several technical experts inside the FAA said October’s Lion Air crash, where the MCAS has been clearly implicated by investigators in Indonesia, is only the latest indicator that the agency’s delegation of airplane certification has gone too far. <br/>