Report on Avweb
So-far-unnamed senior FAA officials overruled their own engineers who called for the immediate grounding of Boeing 737 MAX after the second fatal crash in five months in Ethiopia in March of 2019. The Transportation Department’s Office of Inspector General issued its report on the decision chain within the agency on Friday. It said the engineers immediately noticed the similarities between the Ethiopian Airlines crash and one in October of 2018 involving a Lion Air MAX off Indonesia and urged immediate grounding. “Yet agency officials at headquarters and the Seattle (Aircraft Certification Office) opted not to do so.”