Four weeks before a Lion Air jet plunged into the Java Sea in October, Congress passed provisions that gave the plane's maker, Boeing, even more power to oversee itself.
It was another win in Boeing's long-running campaign to get the federal government to delegate more of the Federal Aviation Administration's safety responsibilities to the company, but it also was a reflection of the difficulties of having a government workforce oversee the design and production of some of the world's most sophisticated machines.
Federal investigators are scrutinizing whether the FAA failed to properly watch over Boeing, which has scrambled to make software fixes after two Boeing 737 Max 8 jets crashed within five months, killing 346 people in Ethiopia and Indonesia. Aviation authorities around the world grounded the aircraft earlier this month after those deadly crashes.
American Airlines is extending cancellations of flights through April 24 due to the grounding of the aircraft. Southwest Airlines is also continuing to make cancellations.
American has 24 Boeing 737 Max aircraft in its fleet, and said Sunday that it will be canceling about 90 flights a day. Not every flight that was previously scheduled to be on a Max aircraft will be canceled, and some flights scheduled to fly on other aircraft types may ultimately be canceled. The airline said it will contact affected fliers directly.
Southwest, which has 34 Max aircraft, is making cancellations five days in advance, with an average of 130 daily cancellations. On Saturday, it also began to ferry all its Max aircraft to a facility in Victorville, Calif., without passengers, to free up space at the airports where they had been parked.
United Airlines, which has 14 Max aircraft, does not have any flights scheduled on the equipment through April 9.
The deaths and the subsequent cancellations have created a crisis for both Boeing and the FAA, even as investigators continue delving into the disasters' causes. A key question is whether the delegation of safety responsibilities to Boeing contributed to officials in both the company and the federal government missing potential software and hardware flaws in the Boeing Max jet.
Boeing reported spending $15 million lobbying Congress, the FAA and other federal agencies last year, and it has hired outside lobbyists to push the oversight delegation issue, according to disclosures filed with the Senate.
The provisions were part of a broader FAA funding and disaster relief bill, which passed by wide margins and was signed by President Donald Trump in October. The law gives private firms more power over the rule books describing what role the FAA has in approving designs.
Congress will hold a hearing Wednesday on federal aviation oversight with acting FAA Administrator Daniel Elwell, who Trump last week said would be replaced with a former Delta Air Lines pilot and executive, Stephen Dickson.
Also testifying will be Department of Transportation Inspector General Calvin Scovel III, whose office has for years raised concerns about the FAA's oversight of its own delegation efforts. Investigators with Scovel's office are probing the certification of the 737 Max, and the Justice Department's criminal division is also looking into the aircraft.
After being directed by Congress, the FAA set up the certification system, known as the Organization Designation Authorization program, in 2005. It delegates power to a company unit inside Boeing that is supposed to do much of the detailed, technical legwork involved with finding whether a company is complying with safety standards.
Proponents of the system said the FAA was understaffed and too slow to issue approvals of new planes, hampering economic growth. Boeing pays the workers, which the company said numbered 1,000 employees in 2015.
The then-chief executive officer of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Ray Conner, defended the system before Congress that year, putting particular emphasis on the argument that the FAA should further cede control to Boeing in areas that are not as important for safety, such as for airplane "seats, lavatories, galleys," bemoaning the "inordinate amount of time spent sometimes on seat certifications, on interior certifications."
That would free up the FAA so it "can be focused on those new technologies" that can be overseen with a more holistic, "risk-based approach" that concentrated more on gauging whether Boeing's overall safety systems are solid, Conner said.
Conner later retired from Boeing and now sits on the board of Alaska Airlines. His comments in 2015 received strong public backing.
"Too often we are seeing unnecessary regulatory burdens that do not serve to improve actual aircraft safety. It seems to be a process simply for the sake of process," said Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., the chairman of the House Transportation Committee at the time.
"Government regulation too often, in the name of protecting the public, makes us less competitive -- and actually does very little to protect the public," said Rep. Tom Rice, R-S.C., who thanked Conner "for American excellence in aviation, and for employing so many thousands of the people in South Carolina."
Rice added that Boeing has a "vested interest" in safety, because "if we sacrifice safety in American aviation, then we won't be competitive in that area very long."
Sophie Seid, a spokesman for Rice, said the congressman "maintains his position that we need to use government resources effectively to prioritize flight safety."
Information for this article was contributed by Michael Laris of The Washington Post; and by staff members of The Associated Press.
A Section on 03/25/2019