Originally Posted by
tdracer
I've touched on this before in other threads, but the FAA has experienced it's own "brain drain" problem. I was a DER/AR for over 25 years before I retired. Must of the FAA people I dealt with were in the same age group as me - and now many if not most of them have also retired. Further, for a long time, many of the people at the Seattle FAA office were ex-Boeing (often disgruntled ex-Boeing but that's another story). They had real world experience working with aircraft systems, and it showed. The last few years before I retired, the new youngsters coming it simply had no real world experience - fresh faced kids right out of college with minimal mentor support from those with decades of experience. They were into box-checking without really comprehending what the meaning of those boxes was. Submit such and such document, check the box. They lacked the deeper understanding what checking those boxes meant - and hence lacked the judgement to determine if something was really safe regardless of if they could check their box.
I found it extremely frustrating trying to deal with them - submittals would get rejected for ridiculous reasons (seriously - I had a submittal rejected because my 8110 form listed one of the effected models as the 747-SP, when the TCDS says 747SP), and I frequently had to explain very basic aspects of the submittals that anyone familiar with commercial aircraft should know (again, seriously - I had to explain "EGT").
Thank you. Precisely!! I think his own emails are key evidence of his behavior. I am led to believe he acted in a way to satisfy what he understood to be the Boeing Commercial objectives, rather than reveal a safety issue he thought he discovered and was initially advising others (within the company) of.
A DER I know and respect, like most the ones I've known, realizes that his word, his integrity, is as essential to his role as his technical competence/expertise. Compromise your word and you will never get it back.
There is no excuse for his alleged behavior, but there are reasons for it and the upper echelons of Boeing commercial should be brought to criminal and financial accountability, as well.