By Clive Irving
A majority (click here) Democratic US House found fault with Boeing and the FAA under the administration of Donald John Trump. The "self regulation" afforded Boeing and the Lion Air crash was enjoyed by Donald John Trump on 29 October 2018.
Nearly a year after a second crash of a Boeing 737 MAX (click here) that led to its grounding, the full extent of the company’s complicity and negligence, abetted by regulators, is revealed by a damning report from the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.
And the issue of how soon this deeply flawed company culture and regulatory system will be fixed becomes even more urgent.
One thing is for sure: in the history of air crash investigations, since the beginning of the Jet Age 60 years ago, there has never been such a serious and sustained breakdown in the safeguards intended to keep flying safe.
I have covered the MAX catastrophe for The Daily Beast since the first crash, of Lion Air Flight 610 in Indonesia that killed 189 passengers and crew on October 29, 2018. Like many other reporters, I was stonewalled and misled by Boeing’s carefully orchestrated and sustained campaign to resist grounding the airplane.
For example, it was obvious to me and other experienced reporters that the Lion Air pilots had been swiftly overcome by a problem that that they had not been trained to prepare for because it was related to a new control system, Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), that they—along with all other MAX flight crews—did not know even existed....
