It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
originally posted by: Salander
Garbage in, garbage out.
Boeing cheats the system and delivers an inferior product to market, the FAA misses the scam, and people were killed.
It doesn't fly like a 737 because it's not a 737.
In a Tuesday hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Muilenburg offered an apology to the families of the victims of two deadly crashes, including the 157 people who were aboard an Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed in March.
Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) pointed to recently unveiled emails and instant messages between Boeing and the FAA. In one exchange, Mark Forkner, a former chief technical pilot at Boeing, boasted that he was “jedi-mind tricking regulators.”
“Can you see that this raises much concern about the level of coziness between Boeing personnel and FAA regulators?” Wicker asked.
Muilenburg, who claimed to have only seen the messages within the past couple of weeks, said that he “understands the concern” and that the sentiments of the remarks run “counter to our values.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who called the CEO’s testimony “quite dismaying,” read through a 2016 text exchange between Forkner and Patrick Gustavsson, another test pilot, in which Forkner said the Max’s maneuvering characteristics augmentation system, known as MCAS, was “running rampant.”
MCAS is a stabilization feature that was designed to force down the nose of the aircraft if its angle got too steep and thereby prevent the plane from stalling. It has been blamed as a factor in both crashes. Investigators have found that the system was triggered by faulty sensor data that erroneously indicated the planes were at risk of stalling.
But MCAS was not mentioned in the Max’s flight manuals. The decision to leave out the information was made just months after Forkner and Gustavsson’s text correspondence, which was given to the Justice Department in February.
Cruz slammed Muilenburg’s claim that he had only seen the conversation this month, asking “how in the hell did nobody bring this to your attention” earlier this year.
Muilenburg said that while he was “made aware of the existence of this kind of document,” he “counted on my counsel to handle that appropriately.”