FAA back under spotlight with latest Boeing incidents

In the wake of a weekend scare on a Boeing 777 over engine failure, the FAA moved immediately to suspend flights on planes with the same model. On Tuesday, the FAA disclosed that it had also been contemplating stricter rules on the same kind of planes even before the Denver flight, following a similar incident on Japanese Airlines in December when a Pratt & Whitney engine also failed. The statement comes as the US agency, once considered the gold standard of aviation safety, works to recover its standing in the wake of the previous Boeing 737 MAX disasters. A September 2020 congressional probe over the two MAX crashes that killed 346 people slammed the agency, saying the crashes were "the horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing's engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing's management, and grossly insufficient oversight by the FAA." FAA chief Steve Dickson reiterated the agency's commitment to safety, saying he looked forward to a NTSB investigation, but that the agency was being proactive. "We're not waiting for that," Dickson said of the NTSB. "We're acting with the best data we have. "We want to understand what happened and to take steps to prevent this from happening again in the future," Dickson said.<br/>