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"Confidence in the FAA is clearly shaken," Calvin Scovel told a Senate hearing on aviation safety in the United States.
He added that his investigators were aiming to complete the review of Boeing jet aircraft approval by the FAA within 10 months.
Scovel's comments come a few hours after Transport Secretary Elaine Chao told another Senate committee that it was "very doubtful" that security systems were not part of the overall package. standard proposed by Boeing on its 737 Max.
"It's very doubtful that it's safety-oriented additions and why they were not part of the model of measures required for an aircraft," she said at the time of the meeting. She testified before the Senate, where she appeared to answer questions about her annual budget request. .
Still, Chao defended the FAA's decision not to immobilize Boeing's signature aircraft after the first of his two fatal accidents.
"The FAA is a very professional organization, based on facts, and it does not make hasty decisions," she said.
FAA interim administrator, Daniel Elwell, also testified, defending the FAA's decision-making deadline for the 737 Max Park shutdown, ruling out the decision of other countries to put the Ground plane based on two crashes within five months.
"The United States and Canada were the first countries to ground the plane with cause and effect data," he said.
He reiterated his previous comments that the FAA had made its decision after an badysis of satellite data and unspecified physical evidence discovered at the crash site.
"I can not talk about the reasoning of other nations," he said. "I know that in contact with these countries, in our requests, what data could they have, they had no data for us".
Boeing and the FAA have been under surveillance since an Ethiopian Airlines jet crashed earlier this month, killing the 157 people on board.
The software update adds the data of a second sensor located on the nose of the aircraft, which measures the horizontal tilt of the aircraft. Existing software has only pulled data from a sensor.
Boeing also announced on Wednesday that it would standardize an alert that will show if both sensors contradict each other. It had been included only as an option in the original model.
More than 200 airline pilots, technical managers and regulators gathered Wednesday at Boeing's Seattle production facility, as the company strives to restore industry confidence in its safety protocols and airworthiness 737 Max.
The rally took place at a time of crisis for the iconic American society, which is now under criminal investigation by the Department of Justice for its certification and marketing of the 737 Max aircraft.
Boeing intends to submit its compliance documents for the updated MCAS (Maneuverability Enhancement System) software to the FAA by the end of the week, announced Tuesday. a Boeing manager.
On Wednesday, industry representatives at the meeting heard from Chief Commercial Pilot Craig Bomben and Mike Sinnett, Vice President of Boeing Commercial Aircraft Strategy, according to a Boeing spokesperson. .
Boeing's software developers developed the system update after extensive technical badysis, design and verification, said the manager. They first submitted a draft certification plan for the FAA update on January 21st.
The MCAS system was added to the 737 Max to offset a displacement of the aircraft's center of gravity compared to the original 737 model, caused in particular by the introduction of new fuel-efficient engines.
The system is designed to automatically order an aircraft to take off when it detects an impending stall.
Boeing's pilots have worked with the company's software design team throughout their production to incorporate multiple layers of protection in the event of sensor error or other mis-seizure, said a senior official. Boeing.
The updated software will also pull data from two sensors, instead of one, said Wednesday Boeing.
Boeing simulator operators have scheduled test flights of the new software with "the most difficult scenarios", mimicking several failure situations, said the manager.
The Boeing pilots then flew a certification flight with the FAA on March 12, two days after the Ethiopian Airlines accident, to demonstrate to the regulators that the updated software was meeting the requirements of the certification, said the manager.
On Saturday, the three US airlines flying the 737 Max flew successful flights on a simulator designed to recreate the Lion Air flight with current software and updated software installed at Boeing's facility in Renton, Wash.
The pilots stated that their training on the 737 Max consisted of a short self-administered online course that made no mention of the new MCAS system and how to disable it in a situation similar to that of the Lion Air pilots and probably the Ethiopian Airlines flights. , faces.
While they were fighting the uncooperative plane and scuba diver last year, pilots of the Air Lion cursed flight attempted to perform a routine maneuver to try to stabilize the plane. by operating a switch near the steering wheel about three times, according to a report from Indonesian investigators.
But the strength of the software continued to send the plane down until reaching an angle that would have been unrecoverable for the pilots.
To shut down the MCAS software, the main driver should have turned around and operated two switches behind him, a gesture that a representative of the American Airline pilots union called "a tremendous leap of logic."
"There is no intuitive connection between these two things," said Captain Jason Goldberg, referring to what the pilots should have faced with the MCAS software and this two-switch solution.
"We have very well trained drivers all over the world, but a scenario involving pre-briefed pilots who know what's going on in a simulator should not be confused with a real emergency involving a system that pilots did not even know existed before the event. " , "Goldberg told CNN after Saturday's session.
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