Shifting blame on pilots to avoid responsibility
By Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
The U.S. aviation system needs urgently to restore the worlds confidence after two crashes of Boeing 737 Max jets.
Instead, the Trump administrations top aviation official, goaded by some Republican lawmakers, informed the world Wednesday that the problem isnt that Boeing put a faulty aircraft into the skies, nor that the Federal Aviation Administrations lax oversight kept it flying. The trouble, they argued, comes from lousy foreign pilots; particularly the ones on Ethiopian Airlines and Indonesias Lion Air who died struggling to pull the 737 Max jets from death plunges.
Im trying to be respectful because theyre deceased, Rep. Paul Mitchell, R-Michigan, said of the doomed crews. But, do we not have concerns not only with the training of pilots in other nations, but the reliability of their logs?
The acting FAA administrator, Daniel Elwell, shared this skepticism and said he absolutely wants to take a hard look at the training standards globally.
Rep. Garret Graves, R-Louisiana, voiced concern about the maintenance programs, the pilot experience requirements, the pilot training programs of the air carriers involved.
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Yep. Nothing makes foreigners want to buy Boeing jets like a little jingoism.
Pilot inexperience may well have played a role in the crashes after the infamous MCAS stabilization system malfunctioned. But that doesnt negate the fact that screwups by both Boeing and the FAA put the faulty aircraft in the air in the first place. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that senior FAA officials failed to review key safety assessments of the MCAS system and that Boeing failed to label the stall-prevention system as a critical component whose malfunction could be catastrophic. MCAS wasnt even originally mentioned in the planes manual. In addition, Boeing had disabled a safety feature designed to warn pilots about malfunctioning sensors related to the system; but it allegedly didnt inform airlines. Boeing didnt inform the FAA until 13 months after it discovered it had offered the safety feature as an add-on option instead of standard.
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