Despite the arrival in earnest of silly season in U.S. political affairs, stuff is happening around the 737 MAX that does appear legitimately really interesting and, though forecasts tend not to age well, holding a medium-to-good size chance of having significant impact.
House Transportation and Infrastructure Comm. Chairs issued a letter (Oct. 1) calling on FAA to release its full documentary record pertaining to return of the aircraft to service. Notwithstanding FAA's nominal response so far, notice that the letter - while not mentioning anywhere the current FOIA litigation against FAA on this very same point - does expressly and with some emphasis point out a federal appellate court ruling in 2017 under which FAA was ordered to release documents to a "safety advocate" group. That group? Flyers Rights Education Fund, Inc. . . . the same as the plaintiff in the current FOIA litigation. Deft move on separation of powers basis by the Committee; plus the none-too-subtly suggested linkage to the recently introduced FAA restructuring and reform bill appears to add some leverage to the FOIA action plaintiffs.
Link to the letter:
https://transportation.house.gov/imo...%20Service.pdf
Second, that FAA restructuring and reform measure, the Aircraft Certification Reform and Accountability Act - well, it's quite a piece of proposed legislation. Suggest the section-by-section summary, or for those with more time on their hands, the actual text of the bill, are easily found on the Committee webpage. There is much to follow as the bill moves now or in the next Congress, and much that could be said directly related to some of the big nasty compelling issues that have shown up in this thread - good example would be the extensive whistleblower and reporting system improvements, and another is what seems likely to be a wholesale overhaul of the ODA system.
Even before getting very far into the actual text of the proposal, two provisions jumped off the page and have led me to notice them here. The creation of a mandatory Safety Management System program for manufacturers would be required to conform to the SARPs of Annex 19 under the Chicago Convention of 1944 - which is expressly cited in the text of the bill. Then, in the next numbered section, the bill sets up an expert review panel to review ODAs as a status. It's a long provision, with several other key terms and provisions but for the present, it charges the expert panel with evaluating (among other things): "the extent to which the holder has implemented a safety culture consistent with the principles of the International Civil Aviation Organization Safety Management Manual, Fourth Edition (International Civil Aviation Organization Doc. No. 9589) or any similar successor document."
Notwithstanding that the FARs already contain various types of references to ICAO materials, this SLF does not claim to know whether those references were mandated by previous legislation, or if this House Committee proposed measure might be breaking some new "public international air law" ground.
Not at all least, the bill does go big on legislating protections for employees who object to acts or omissions, and whether it would obviate the quandaries said to confront engineers (in previous posts) could be an interesting subject. Or alleviate those pressures, at least.