Once the world’s benchmark for making flying safer, the agency hasn’t been doing its job for years. This isn’t even the first time it let a dangerous plane fly.
By Clive Irving
The fact that it has taken President Trump to override his own
government’s transportation officials in order to ground the Boeing 737
MAX-8 is an indication that Boeing and the world’s largest regulator,
the Federal Aviation Administration, have become too close and too
complacent about the role of technology in airline safety.
When
Canada, with the world’s third largest fleet of MAX-8s, grounded them
the FAA was left starkly alone in refusing to act. The Canadians said
they acted because new data on the crash Sunday of Ethiopian Airways Flight 302 appeared to confirm similarities with the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 last October.
That data came from a new satellite-based flight tracking system
still in testing that was developed as an answer to the disappearance
of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Aireon delivered data on the erratic
path taken by the Ethiopian jet that the Canadians decided followed the
same pattern seen in the final minutes of the Lion Air flight.
The same data was provided to the FAA but they did not respond to it with the same urgency shown by the Canadian regulator.
A
total of 346 people died in the two crashes and both are believed to
involve a flaw in flight controls that forced the airplanes into a
nosedive.
The widely held idea that the FAA is the gold standard
of aviation regulatory agencies is another of those misplaced beliefs in
American primacy based on history rather than current reality.
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Source: The Daily Beast
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