Boeing 737 Max jet had 'anomalies,' FAA's acting director says
Federal Aviation Administration Acting Director Daniel Elwell, speaking in an exclusive interview with FOX Business’ Liz Claman, said it has informed Boeing to correct the irregularities found in the Boeing 737 Max jet.
“As we look very deeply into this, we have discovered some anomalies and then we have directed Boeing to mitigate those anomalies and that’s an ongoing process,” he said on “The Claman Countdown” Wednesday.
The Boeing 737 Max planes have remained grounded by aviation officials since mid-March as the company copes with the fallout of two fatal crashes that killed 346 people. Lion Air Flight 610 crashed last October shortly after takeoff in Indonesia. Investigators note a malfunction in Max 8 plane’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, known as MCAS, pushed the plane to nose down before it plunged into the Java Sea killing 189 people.
The same software was implicated in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March.
Elwell said the FAA has been gathering data on all the Max fleet operations in Canada and the U.S. prior to the Lion Air accident. After the Ethiopian Airlines incident, the FAA said it began to look for a definitive link that tied the two accidents together.
“When we received that link through data and evidence found at the actual crash site in Ethiopia, we grounded the aircraft,” Elwell said.
Sorrow and fury poured out of Paul Njoroge at a House Transportation subcommittee hearing on aviation safety. The Canadian man lost his wife, three young children and mother-in-law in the crash that killed all 157 onboard.
Njoroge put most of the blame on Boeing, but he echoed what critics have pointed out that the FAA surrenders too much of its authority to the Chicago-based company.
“The FAA should have known that the failure to have triple redundancy in critical safety systems could cause crashes and death -- they recklessly left Boeing to police itself,” Njoroge said.
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Elwell reiterated that the aviation agency oversees the entire process between the Boeing, its employees, the FAA and safety inspectors.
“I can assure the public that the FAA is a 45,000-person organization, many of whom dedicated their lives to safety,” he said.