Originally Posted by
FlightlessParrot
@tdracer: I respect your comments. May I ask if you have any idea why the FAA were slow? It could be that all bureaucrats are incompetent and feckless (a right-wing answer), or it could be that the FAA was under-resourced (a left-wing answer).
I'd say it's quite a bit of both. The FAA - at least the Seattle Area Certification Office (SACO) - was understaffed, both in numbers and in expertise (I say 'was' because I don't have much visibility of what's happened in the 2 1/2 years since I retired, although I have little reason to believe it's changed significantly). Expertise had become a major problem in the last several years before I retired - for a long time most of the SACO people were ex-Boeing and brought their expertise and experience (and many were disgruntled ex-Boeing or otherwise had an axe to grind so it's not like they gave Boeing an easy time of it) - but for various reasons that stopped being the case maybe 15 years ago. Instead they brought in fresh-faced college kids and transfers from other locations that lacked experience in big commercial aircraft. We had one SACO guy working Propulsion who came up from the LA Office - which might have been OK except he'd never worked Propulsion before and had no idea how our systems worked. He was such a nightmare to deal with that his name became almost a swear word among the ARs (delegated DER) - as in when we found he was working your project it was said you'd been Xxxxx'ed (where Xxxxx was his name).
All that being said, a big reasons ex-Boeing people stopped migrating to SACO was because we'd heard what a bureaucratic nightmare the place had become (and was getting worse). I knew two two people that had gone to the FAA from Boeing, only to return to Boeing because they couldn't stand the FAA bureaucracy...