> The U.S. government on Friday said Boeing
can once again issue airworthiness certificates for its bestselling 737 Max aircraft and 787 Dreamliners, an authority that was stripped from the manufacturer after fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 of the 737 Max.
I'm a bit confused by this. From what I've read an "airworthiness certificate" is not a certificate that the aircraft design is good and safe. That would be a type certificate.
The airworthiness certificate is issued for a particular aircraft and certifies that it conforms to the approved design for that type of aircraft, all outstanding airworthiness directives applicable to the type have been applied, no unsafe alterations or repairs have been made, all required documentation and logs are present, the inspector doesn't see any damage, leaks, or other problems that could make it unsafe, and other things like that.
The two 737 MAX crashes had nothing to do with anything that would have been found during their airworthiness inspections. They were functioning exactly as they were designed to, as covered by their type certificate.
So what was the point of suspending Boeing's authority to do those inspections?
The issue was actually the door plug scandal. It showed that Boeing's QC was compromised in their factory and they were not able to properly certify that the aircraft were being built as designed.
As an aside this a long talked-about problem with the South Carolina factory, that the place does not follow aerospace standards and practices. The door plug failure was the highest profile QC miss out of that factory.
> The FAA stopped allowing Boeing to issue airworthiness certificates for 737 MAX airplanes in 2019 during their return to service following the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, and for Boeing 787 airplanes in 2022 because of production quality issues.
>So what was the point of suspending Boeing's authority to do those inspections?
Disclaimer: I used to work in airworthiness certification as well as maintenance and design modification engineering for the C-130, but not for any of the Boeing products.
You're generally correct. In layperson's terms, the Type Certificate is like the blueprint or the spec, and the individual airworthiness certificates are a certification that each aircraft coming off the assembly line is in conformance with the approved type design.
When the MCAS debacle happened, the FAA mandated a change to the type design, and further mandated embodiment of that design change through an Airworthiness Directive. This is the part that addressed the MCAS hazard condition. When they withheld Boeing's authority to issue certificates what that really gave them was, at the airframe serial number level, the ability to ensure that the modifications had been embodied correctly.
You're right that that final certification has little to do with correcting the underlying MCAS design flaw, but there were also quality issues with the 787, and because Boeing's in-house ODA issues those certificates acting as the FAA itself, and those certifications are essentially the last hurdle before delivery of the aircraft (and thus the last hurdle before revenue coming into Boeing's coffers), the FAA withheld that authority so that Boeing employees could not be unduly pressured by management's perverse incentives.
In fewer words, it was about ensuring independence in final airworthiness release, and ensuring Boeing's ODA could not be pressured by management who subscribe to the Jack Welch school of ethics.
------
Edited to add:
There is a valid argument to be made that the FAA didn't handle this situation correctly/adequately. For context, in aerospace when we identify that a hazard condition exists we classify both the severity and the likelihood of occurrence. So for example depending on the organization's risk acceptance matrix, one might have a hazard with high severity but extremely low chance of occurrence, and that might be considered acceptably safe (or not!).
The FAA now says that the back-and-forth they have been doing over the last however many months produced comparable production-quality findings regardless of which organization issued the certificates (Boeing's ODA or the FAA itself).
As best I could tell at the time this issue was a hot topic, when it withheld Boeing's issuance authority the FAA never clearly articulated:
- Which risks it was controlling,
- How much risk reduction it expected,
- What data would demonstrate effectiveness, and
- What objective conditions would permit termination of the withholding
So again, there's an argument that the FAA just sort of decided that they now have that Warm Fuzzy and everything is fine.
“You can no longer certify aircraft of this design as safe” seems a reasonable response to a design flaw causing multiple crashes. My question would be whether the design flaws have been addressed. If not, then allowing them to keep making and certifying them does turn the whole exercise into a piece of theatre. Unfortunately, it’s a totally believable decision for some bureaucracies.
The two are unrelated, though. The airworthiness certificate is focused on whether a particular plane is built according to the design. It doesn't say anything about the design. And the planes were still being certified, just by the FAA instead of Boeing.
(Looking at a bit more research, I think this bit was revoked because during the investigation the FAA found that Boeing was skimping on these inspections too, but the details are a little unclear)
The 737 has had 14 major recertifications. The aircraft today looks/behaves nothing like the original from the 1960s.
The main motivation for recertifications comes from commercial pressure where if a aircraft is given a new number and not recertified, then the pilots have to be retrained.
Honestly, back when the 737 MAX debacle happened, a lot of consumers claimed that they would stop flying aircrafts if they ran into 737 MAXs. And I don't think it happened in enough numbers - or even enough to make news. Sales went through the roof, everything kept working.
Recertifications are very common. The issue really is is the aircraft is AS different and untested as the old MAXs, and I really can't see that happening again in the next decade or two atleast.
Honestly they kinda screwed over people -- like me -- who tried to avoid the MAX planes for a while. I'd specifically book around the MAX planes and then they would change equipment at the last minute into a MAX. There is no meaningful "knob" an aviation consumer can turn to express an aircraft preference, and given how US airspace works, you often don't have a meaningful choice in carrier (unless you're willing to take on extra stops).
> Honestly, back when the 737 MAX debacle happened, a lot of consumers claimed that they would stop flying aircrafts if they ran into 737 MAXs. And I don't think it happened in enough numbers - or even enough to make news. Sales went through the roof, everything kept working.
Is this kind of consumer revolt even really possible?
If you feel strongly enough that you refuse to fly altogether, then of course you can avoid flying on a 737 MAX. But I think most people did not feel the risk was that high. They just want to select "guarantee no 737 MAX" when booking a flight, and as far as I can tell that option doesn't exist.
Even if the flight is not a 737 MAX when you book, they can and sometimes do change aircraft, and as far as I know there's no option to get your money back when they do. If you show up and see it's a 737 MAX...you either get on or you lose your money, and have to find some other way to get where you're going, right?
Toyota had the largest recall in history for the unintended acceleration debacle. Yes, lots of people were saying they'd never set foot in a toyota again. Now people don't even remember it.
Just to comprehend this a bit better - it sounds like the FAA had stripped Boeing of the ability to self-recertify and actually sent inspectors for the most recent certifications. After several successful certifications and what would appear, to the inspectors, to be real process improvements, they're now re-granting Boeing the ability to self-recertify when self-recertification is allowed?
This is well outside my knowledge domain so I'm not trying to make any statements on whether this was correct, but rather to better comprehend the change.
This is not exactly the same thing, this isn't Boeing being allowed to sign off on their design -- this is only the airworthiness certificate which means "this particular airplane we just built follows the spec which was already otherwise approved".
I have read that self-issuance of airworthiness certificates has been normal since the 1950s. Given that, I don't think the issue is due to regulatory corruption but an issue at Boeing which has (hopefully) been resolved.
No it's actually bad when financialization reaches such a degree that planes fall out of the sky.
You as an oncologist: "cells have been dividing for thousands of years and are better off for it. the word is meaningless. I would hate to be a single-celled organism." lmao
Great insight! Therefore there's no such thing as pathological cell division or pathological financialization. Or maybe it's just if someone is super super super smart, they get so smart they somehow lose the ability to distinguish between productive and pathological financialization, and then they get to make asinine comments on HN.
Cancer is a disease that attacks living organisms, similar to how collectivism attacks living societies.
"Financialization" is a 7 syllable word with no definition.
There is nothing about how Boeing builds & sells planes today that is qualitatively different than how they did it 50 years ago. Yes I am familiar with the concern that engineers hold less sway than previously and I agree this is a concern. I would not be shocked to discover that it's true. But this is not a new thing.
People who sell a thing, be they multinational airline manufactures, or a kid selling lemonade, have been able to profit by lying or skimping on quality since the dawn of time.
If your concern is that Boeing will skimp on quality & safety, then say that, instead of a buzz word like "financialization"
I have no idea where you came across the word, but when I see it used, there's generally a lot of handwaving and some vague implication that it's some new concept/activity that started in the 1970's. The only consistencies I've observed in attempts to define it is that money = financialization or "number go up" = financialization, and the speaker is generally uncomfortable with money as one of the tools we use to organize society.
Financialization, in this context, refers to the process by which financial results, especially those legible to capital markets, exert pressure on the upstream industrial/corporate processes and inputs that produce those financial results.
"Excessive" or "obscene" or "pathological" financialization is when that feedback loop or reverse pressure ends up producing negative impacts on industrial/corporate processes, often in pursuit of shorter term positive effects on the financial results.
The exact mechanisms of this have been extremely well-documented in the numerous reports created in the wake of the 737 MAX failures.
Could you try leveling a substantive response now instead of a chain of strawmen and associative "the vibes of the speaker are generally off" type dismissals?
Capital markets have existed for hundreds of years. They are not doing anything today that they were not doing in 1602.
I am familiar with the 737 MAX critique and I'm very comfortable saying that Boeing was sloppy and cut corners. I just don't think the decisions they faced and failed on are new. 300 years ago someone built someone a ship and cheaped out in some way and it sank. Call it cheating/lying/scamming if you like, but the word "financialization" does not help anyone understand what's going on.
No actually there was a pretty specific transition in American business culture to shareholder primacy in the 70s-80s with measurable behavior changes across corporate America, including executive incentive structures.
The EU is like a tiger - without teeth, fur or claws. I think the only thing that works here is total boycott of airplanes that constantly unalive people through mass crashes. (Wikipedia really gathers useful data here in a simple-to-read manner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...)
> The EU is like a tiger - without teeth, fur or claws.
EU regs forced apple to move to type-c. They appear to be moving towards either requiring replaceable batteries, or requiring a higher quality batter (larger % of original charge after 1000 cycles). Those both seem valuable to consumers, and coming from a position of regulatory strength.
No what you see down the chain of comments are people confidently repeating the exact pattern that the OIG report on this failure actually blames for it.
They keep insisting there's some binary distinction between type certification and production certification. The entire crux of OIG's diagnosis is that this is actually a much more permeable and fluid process, and the permeability of it is exactly what allowed a faulty MCAS design to make it to production.
I did, in fact, spend a bit of time trying to look this up, because as pointed out by other comments, it was not entirely clear what relationship this revocation (which is about inspecting built aircraft vs the design) had to do with the crashes (which were primarily the result of a faulty design). I didn't find a particularly illuminating summary other than maybe the investigation also turned up some other problems.
More to the point, the original poster was implying that there would be a relationship between the reinstatement of Boeing's self-certification and future crashes. Which I think would be worth some deeper analysis beyond 'corporations bad'.
Not sure if you just gave up halfway through the 4-sentence long comment, but I was actually suggesting that you use it to go find the thousands of pages of high-quality source information.
As has been noted in several of the comments, the crashes were a result of a faulty design, not aircraft failing to meet the design.
The self-certification here wasn’t part of the chain of events that led to the crashes; it appears to have been related to other issues the FAA uncovered as a side effect of their investigation.
As has been noted in the actual reports, the crashes (as is true of all crashes) were the result of a specific chain of failures across several functions and organizations.
One component of that chain of failures is the self-certification process. If the FAA had the resource and mandate to actually understand each aircraft design change, then it's very likely (not guaranteed, but very likely) that the MCAS design having a single point of failure on the AoA sensor would have been flagged as problematic by FAA.
The addition of MCAS to the 737 MAX received type approval by the FAA in response to Boeing's documentation, not in response to anything Boeing approved or issued. No aircraft manufacturer has ever been allowed to issue a type certificate.
The self-certification process (airworthiness certificates) is the manufacturer (rather than the regulator's inspectors) stating "this one specific aircraft with serial number _______ has been built according to the design covered by its type certificate". Nothing more.
In other words, an airworthiness certificate only specifies that a specific aircraft is airworthy /because/ it is built according to an airworthy design. Whether the design is safe or not has always only been up to the regulator to decide. In this case, the regulator dropped the ball and approved an unsafe design. If Boeing was not allowed to self-certify their own aircraft, the FAA would still have issued airworthiness certificates for them, including the two aircraft that would have gone on to kill hundreds of people, because they were built according to the design the FAA approved.
No, an early, low-risk version of MCAS was proposed and given type approval by FAA. Then the MCAS design was changed iteratively and continuously without prompting another type approval process. Thenceforth, Boeing's ODA self-certification process was the only statutorily required step that could have caught that the post-type approval changes actually increased the risk significantly.
You should read the OIG report. It actually discusses all of this. It is absolutely possible an FAA cert would've missed the MCAS issue as well, but as OIG points out, one variable was significant commercial pressure on Boeing's ODA to approve the (iterated-since-type-approved)-MCAS. Presumably FAA staff would be less susceptible to this type of commercial pressure.
Design changes are not part of the self certification process, they’re part of the type certification process, which has always been handled by the FAA.
Design changes de facto are part of the self-cert process because it had no requirement for FAA oversight of post-flight design changes.
DOT OIG disagrees that this played no role. Here's from Page 2 of their report, i.e. the entire "Findings" summary:
While FAA and Boeing followed the established certification process for the 737 MAX 8, we identified limitations in FAA’s guidance and processes that impacted certification and led to a significant misunderstanding of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), the flight control software identified as contributing to the two accidents. First, FAA’s certification guidance does not adequately address integrating new technologies into existing aircraft models. Second, FAA did not have a complete understanding of Boeing’s safety assessments performed on MCAS until after the first accident. Communication gaps further hindered the effectiveness of the certification process. In addition, management and oversight weaknesses limit FAA’s ability to assess and mitigate risks with the Boeing ODA. For example, FAA has not yet implemented a risk-based approach to ODA oversight, and engineers in FAA’s Boeing oversight office continue to face challenges in balancing certification and oversight responsibilities. Moreover, the Boeing ODA process and structure do not ensure ODA personnel are adequately independent. While the Agency has taken steps to develop a risk-based oversight model and address concerns of undue pressure at the Boeing ODA, it is not clear that FAA’s current oversight structure and processes can effectively identify future high-risk safety concerns at the ODA.
You are confidently acting like you understand this process, while repeatedly confusing design certification (of the type) vs. airworthiness certification (of individual airplanes).
Nah, you can figure that out pretty easily yourself, and I get the sense your question is not in good faith. Earlier in this thread you called someone "profoundly lazy" for asking a less simple question.
There are many types of designation in the system; your quote above is _not_ about Production Certification ODA staff (which this article is about), and indeed there is no world where Production Certification ODA would be expected to find the MCAS issue your quote is about. Those would be Type Certification ODA folks.
You should go read the OIG report. Kind of a bummer because they put all this work into a document that you're just sitting here exemplifying the exact misunderstanding that they found as the major issue.
I'm a bit confused by this. From what I've read an "airworthiness certificate" is not a certificate that the aircraft design is good and safe. That would be a type certificate.
The airworthiness certificate is issued for a particular aircraft and certifies that it conforms to the approved design for that type of aircraft, all outstanding airworthiness directives applicable to the type have been applied, no unsafe alterations or repairs have been made, all required documentation and logs are present, the inspector doesn't see any damage, leaks, or other problems that could make it unsafe, and other things like that.
The two 737 MAX crashes had nothing to do with anything that would have been found during their airworthiness inspections. They were functioning exactly as they were designed to, as covered by their type certificate.
So what was the point of suspending Boeing's authority to do those inspections?
As an aside this a long talked-about problem with the South Carolina factory, that the place does not follow aerospace standards and practices. The door plug failure was the highest profile QC miss out of that factory.
> The FAA stopped allowing Boeing to issue airworthiness certificates for 737 MAX airplanes in 2019 during their return to service following the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, and for Boeing 787 airplanes in 2022 because of production quality issues.
Disclaimer: I used to work in airworthiness certification as well as maintenance and design modification engineering for the C-130, but not for any of the Boeing products.
You're generally correct. In layperson's terms, the Type Certificate is like the blueprint or the spec, and the individual airworthiness certificates are a certification that each aircraft coming off the assembly line is in conformance with the approved type design.
When the MCAS debacle happened, the FAA mandated a change to the type design, and further mandated embodiment of that design change through an Airworthiness Directive. This is the part that addressed the MCAS hazard condition. When they withheld Boeing's authority to issue certificates what that really gave them was, at the airframe serial number level, the ability to ensure that the modifications had been embodied correctly.
You're right that that final certification has little to do with correcting the underlying MCAS design flaw, but there were also quality issues with the 787, and because Boeing's in-house ODA issues those certificates acting as the FAA itself, and those certifications are essentially the last hurdle before delivery of the aircraft (and thus the last hurdle before revenue coming into Boeing's coffers), the FAA withheld that authority so that Boeing employees could not be unduly pressured by management's perverse incentives.
In fewer words, it was about ensuring independence in final airworthiness release, and ensuring Boeing's ODA could not be pressured by management who subscribe to the Jack Welch school of ethics.
------
Edited to add:
There is a valid argument to be made that the FAA didn't handle this situation correctly/adequately. For context, in aerospace when we identify that a hazard condition exists we classify both the severity and the likelihood of occurrence. So for example depending on the organization's risk acceptance matrix, one might have a hazard with high severity but extremely low chance of occurrence, and that might be considered acceptably safe (or not!).
The FAA now says that the back-and-forth they have been doing over the last however many months produced comparable production-quality findings regardless of which organization issued the certificates (Boeing's ODA or the FAA itself).
As best I could tell at the time this issue was a hot topic, when it withheld Boeing's issuance authority the FAA never clearly articulated:
- Which risks it was controlling,
- How much risk reduction it expected,
- What data would demonstrate effectiveness, and
- What objective conditions would permit termination of the withholding
So again, there's an argument that the FAA just sort of decided that they now have that Warm Fuzzy and everything is fine.
(Looking at a bit more research, I think this bit was revoked because during the investigation the FAA found that Boeing was skimping on these inspections too, but the details are a little unclear)
The main motivation for recertifications comes from commercial pressure where if a aircraft is given a new number and not recertified, then the pilots have to be retrained.
Honestly, back when the 737 MAX debacle happened, a lot of consumers claimed that they would stop flying aircrafts if they ran into 737 MAXs. And I don't think it happened in enough numbers - or even enough to make news. Sales went through the roof, everything kept working.
Recertifications are very common. The issue really is is the aircraft is AS different and untested as the old MAXs, and I really can't see that happening again in the next decade or two atleast.
Is this kind of consumer revolt even really possible?
If you feel strongly enough that you refuse to fly altogether, then of course you can avoid flying on a 737 MAX. But I think most people did not feel the risk was that high. They just want to select "guarantee no 737 MAX" when booking a flight, and as far as I can tell that option doesn't exist.
Even if the flight is not a 737 MAX when you book, they can and sometimes do change aircraft, and as far as I know there's no option to get your money back when they do. If you show up and see it's a 737 MAX...you either get on or you lose your money, and have to find some other way to get where you're going, right?
I lived in Tokyo. I used to spend more to avoid getting accosted at the US border. A lot more.
You can't call it choice when your vendors all offer the same product for the same price.
This is well outside my knowledge domain so I'm not trying to make any statements on whether this was correct, but rather to better comprehend the change.
Oncologist: You have Stage 4 cancer
You: Wow, that's frightening
Oncologist: You've had it at least since September, were you frightened then?
Brilliant argument. No longer concerned!
Or are you implying that "since no plane crashed since September, they're safe going forward"?
"Read the article". Clearly reading is not enough.
I don’t want to barter my chickens for your shoe leather.
You as an oncologist: "cells have been dividing for thousands of years and are better off for it. the word is meaningless. I would hate to be a single-celled organism." lmao
Great insight! Therefore there's no such thing as pathological cell division or pathological financialization. Or maybe it's just if someone is super super super smart, they get so smart they somehow lose the ability to distinguish between productive and pathological financialization, and then they get to make asinine comments on HN.
"Financialization" is a 7 syllable word with no definition.
There is nothing about how Boeing builds & sells planes today that is qualitatively different than how they did it 50 years ago. Yes I am familiar with the concern that engineers hold less sway than previously and I agree this is a concern. I would not be shocked to discover that it's true. But this is not a new thing.
People who sell a thing, be they multinational airline manufactures, or a kid selling lemonade, have been able to profit by lying or skimping on quality since the dawn of time.
If your concern is that Boeing will skimp on quality & safety, then say that, instead of a buzz word like "financialization"
I have no idea where you came across the word, but when I see it used, there's generally a lot of handwaving and some vague implication that it's some new concept/activity that started in the 1970's. The only consistencies I've observed in attempts to define it is that money = financialization or "number go up" = financialization, and the speaker is generally uncomfortable with money as one of the tools we use to organize society.
Financialization, in this context, refers to the process by which financial results, especially those legible to capital markets, exert pressure on the upstream industrial/corporate processes and inputs that produce those financial results.
"Excessive" or "obscene" or "pathological" financialization is when that feedback loop or reverse pressure ends up producing negative impacts on industrial/corporate processes, often in pursuit of shorter term positive effects on the financial results.
The exact mechanisms of this have been extremely well-documented in the numerous reports created in the wake of the 737 MAX failures.
Could you try leveling a substantive response now instead of a chain of strawmen and associative "the vibes of the speaker are generally off" type dismissals?
I am familiar with the 737 MAX critique and I'm very comfortable saying that Boeing was sloppy and cut corners. I just don't think the decisions they faced and failed on are new. 300 years ago someone built someone a ship and cheaped out in some way and it sank. Call it cheating/lying/scamming if you like, but the word "financialization" does not help anyone understand what's going on.
EU regs forced apple to move to type-c. They appear to be moving towards either requiring replaceable batteries, or requiring a higher quality batter (larger % of original charge after 1000 cycles). Those both seem valuable to consumers, and coming from a position of regulatory strength.
I think a better analogy is "The EU is like a lumbering elephant. You can steer it, but only if you know how. Otherwise it just keeps on lumbering"
Airbus was a bureaucrats wet dream, and by modern Biz Bro standards should never have got off the ground.
Now it rules the skies. Boeing, having drunk the financial Kool Aid is wilting
Tortoise and the hare?
I look down the chain of these comments and looks like others had no problem
They keep insisting there's some binary distinction between type certification and production certification. The entire crux of OIG's diagnosis is that this is actually a much more permeable and fluid process, and the permeability of it is exactly what allowed a faulty MCAS design to make it to production.
Here, put it into your favorite LLM: "Is there a suspected or established relationship between Boeing's self-certification and the 737 MAX crashes?"
That will almost certainly link to the thousands of pages of Congressional, OIG, FAA testimony, investigation, and reporting.
Does GP think Boeing's self-certification authority was revoked after the accidents just for funsies? By random chance?
More to the point, the original poster was implying that there would be a relationship between the reinstatement of Boeing's self-certification and future crashes. Which I think would be worth some deeper analysis beyond 'corporations bad'.
The self-certification here wasn’t part of the chain of events that led to the crashes; it appears to have been related to other issues the FAA uncovered as a side effect of their investigation.
One component of that chain of failures is the self-certification process. If the FAA had the resource and mandate to actually understand each aircraft design change, then it's very likely (not guaranteed, but very likely) that the MCAS design having a single point of failure on the AoA sensor would have been flagged as problematic by FAA.
The self-certification process (airworthiness certificates) is the manufacturer (rather than the regulator's inspectors) stating "this one specific aircraft with serial number _______ has been built according to the design covered by its type certificate". Nothing more.
In other words, an airworthiness certificate only specifies that a specific aircraft is airworthy /because/ it is built according to an airworthy design. Whether the design is safe or not has always only been up to the regulator to decide. In this case, the regulator dropped the ball and approved an unsafe design. If Boeing was not allowed to self-certify their own aircraft, the FAA would still have issued airworthiness certificates for them, including the two aircraft that would have gone on to kill hundreds of people, because they were built according to the design the FAA approved.
You should read the OIG report. It actually discusses all of this. It is absolutely possible an FAA cert would've missed the MCAS issue as well, but as OIG points out, one variable was significant commercial pressure on Boeing's ODA to approve the (iterated-since-type-approved)-MCAS. Presumably FAA staff would be less susceptible to this type of commercial pressure.
DOT OIG disagrees that this played no role. Here's from Page 2 of their report, i.e. the entire "Findings" summary:
While FAA and Boeing followed the established certification process for the 737 MAX 8, we identified limitations in FAA’s guidance and processes that impacted certification and led to a significant misunderstanding of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), the flight control software identified as contributing to the two accidents. First, FAA’s certification guidance does not adequately address integrating new technologies into existing aircraft models. Second, FAA did not have a complete understanding of Boeing’s safety assessments performed on MCAS until after the first accident. Communication gaps further hindered the effectiveness of the certification process. In addition, management and oversight weaknesses limit FAA’s ability to assess and mitigate risks with the Boeing ODA. For example, FAA has not yet implemented a risk-based approach to ODA oversight, and engineers in FAA’s Boeing oversight office continue to face challenges in balancing certification and oversight responsibilities. Moreover, the Boeing ODA process and structure do not ensure ODA personnel are adequately independent. While the Agency has taken steps to develop a risk-based oversight model and address concerns of undue pressure at the Boeing ODA, it is not clear that FAA’s current oversight structure and processes can effectively identify future high-risk safety concerns at the ODA.
https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/FAA%20Certificat...
Maybe DOT OIG is confused? Big if true!
There are many types of designation in the system; your quote above is _not_ about Production Certification ODA staff (which this article is about), and indeed there is no world where Production Certification ODA would be expected to find the MCAS issue your quote is about. Those would be Type Certification ODA folks.