Christian Smith
(NewsNation) – The FAA, in coordination with Boeing, has been giving long compliance deadlines for airlines to fix dangerous and potentially catastrophic defects in their Boeing planes, according to whistleblower allegations.
Instead of requiring fixes to be made immediately or within months, they sometimes give airlines several years, he said.
A man who spent decades as an aerospace engineer at Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration is sounding the alarm today because he says both organizations are too welcoming and that is putting passengers at risk.
In April 2018, a fan blade broke inside the engine of the Southwest Flight 1380 and destroyed the engine, sending shrapnel into the plane and killing Jennifer Riordan, a 43-year-old mother of two.
A year and seven months earlier, the same thing happened in the same model engine and the same model 737 plane, opening a hole above the left wing during the flight over Mississippi.
Mike Dostert spent seven years as an aerospace engineer at Boeing and 32 years at the FAA. Today, he is denouncing both, saying faults in the plane’s engine intakes have not been fixed.
“You would think Boeing and the FAA would resolve this quickly; in other words, fix the engine intake so that if another fan blade fails, the engine intake is structurally sound and will not fail,” Dostert said. “Should not. Their certification requirements would require that this intake remain on the airplane and contain the fan blades.”
Dostert, who now works with the Aviation Safety Foundationsays Boeing and the FAA continue to inspect plane blades, but have not resolved the underlying design problem and do not plan to do so for another four years.
“They’re going to give the airlines until 2028 to fix this,” Dostert said. “So essentially 10 years of operating the fleet with this known unsafe condition that resulted in an accident.”
In April, he wrote to the FAA administrator, citing numerous examples.
“We remain concerned that similar deficiencies in safety culture that have been identified at Boeing are showing signs of existence within the FAA,” he wrote.
He added that “the business as usual approach applied by the FAA needs immediate correction to avoid unnecessary exposure to catastrophic failure conditions.”
“People should ask the FAA, ‘Do you know who’s running the ship here?’” Dostert said. “Is it the FAA or is it Boeing?”
Dostert believes it is Boeing.
“I think the FAA’s safety culture has basically gotten to the point where they’re a captured agency,” he said.
The FAA did not respond to his letter. NewsNation requested comment and, while it did not directly respond to our questions, partially issued the following statement.
“The FAA considers all comments we receive on a proposed airworthiness directive, including that from the Flight Safety Foundation, and we will review all input as part of the process,” an FAA spokesperson said in an email.
Boeing did not respond to NewsNation’s questions or requests for comment.
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