
EASA Insists on Testing Boeing 737 Max Itself Before Lifting Ban - kunkurus
https://simpleflying.com/easa-737-max-test/
======
cadence-
Americans have been dismantling and weakening their regulatory bodies for
quite a while now. The idea is that this will unshackle big corporations and
allow them to innovate faster. This sounds like a great idea, until you
realize that this “innovation” is most often about increasing profits. And the
quality of the product is often sacrificed to increase profits. Just look at
what is happening to telecommunication services, with big corporations growing
their profits while Americans get stuck with slow and expensive service that
becomes relatively worse comparing to other western countries.

Lack of proper regulation (or enforcement) might lead to short-term gains in
some economic indicators, but in the long term will lead to worse quality,
relative decline of America comparing to other countries, and sometimes -like
in this case- avoidable deaths of hundreds of innocent people.

~~~
tyri_kai_psomi
This is a common misunderstanding I see repeated a lot. The idea isn't
unshackling big corporations, it's about unshackling small to medium sized
businesses and entrepreneurs. Big corps actually love regulations for the
barriers to entry they create, and most of them already have a whole host of
regulatory compliance teams armed and ready to dissect the next big regulation
that comes.

> Americans get stuck with slow and expensive service that becomes relatively
> worse comparing to other western countries.

Internet speeds in most suburban, and urban locations in the US have
dramatically increased as of late due to increased threat of competition
(namely Google Fiber, which prompted AT&T to start heavily developing Fiber,
which prompted the Spectrums of the world to increase speeds) and could be
further accelerated by deregulation. Regulations are actually the primary
reason that keeps cable companies in their monopolistic/oligarlistic
positions.

As far as I am aware, the only western countries that have surpassed the US in
internet speeds and stability for the majority of its populace are actually
east, in countries like S.Korea and Japan.

Interestingly enough, Japan is mostly voluntarily self regulated.

~~~
rsynnott
So, on the high end, the US is fine, and thus is does fairly well on mean
speeds (top 10 on some metrics). However, if your internet in the US is bad,
it's often really, _really_ bad. In areas without competition, providers still
sometimes use ADSL1! (Max 8 down, <1 up, if you're lucky).

In general, the tendency in most European countries has been to force
wholesaling and/or LLU, and set minimum standards for both; this has generally
at least wiped out ADSL1. The FCC is somewhat lighter touch.

~~~
merb
well is ADSL1 that bad? in most cases (non video on demand) bandwidth is never
the problem. no matter how good your bandwidth is as soon as the latency is
bad, it won't get better.

~~~
oarsinsync
There are times when my mobile speeds degrade to around 1-2Mbps (typical ADSL1
sync speeds), with variable latency depending on how much throughput is being
used (typical ADSL1 experience). Webpages (being the insanely bloated things
that they are today) stop loading at that point, and I have to wait for my
phone to sync to a different tower. This often happens during my commute when
I hit congested towers. It's annoying that the experience on a 56k dialup
connection in 1999 was better than it is on a 4G mobile phone in 2019.

------
nolok
It’s important to understand that the main threat to both agency from this
issue is very different.

The threat to the FAA is external, they risk losing their worldwide stamp “if
we validate it then the rest of the world do”. That means the long term damage
they risk is much bigger, but the short term and political one is non
existent, they just need to convince everyone that nothing happened and
they’re back at their game. For the FAA either nothing change or they lose
some standing and power, there is no path where they come out better than
before.

The EASA complaints are internal, each country and the remnants of their own
agency blaming them for accepting the plane validation from the FAA when it’s
clear they shouldn’t have. Short term they look stupid, but either they go
back to the old position like nothing happened, or they make themselves more
powerful and independent compared to the FAA on such issue, possibly getting
other countries outside EU/USA to listen to them as much if not more than to
the FAA.

Up until now the word of the FAA may as well have been the word of god in that
field, they risk losing it, and the EASA is in a good place to get a good
piece of it.

So the FAA needs to downplay it as much as possible, and the EASA needs to
instead make it into as much of a big deal as possible. Of course the EASA is
very much helped by the fact that it was indeed a totally avoidable yet
complete failure and disaster that, from a regulatory perspective, can be
entirely pinned down on the FAA.

All they need to do is point at the fact unaltered, and say “the only way we
can stop that from happening again is if you agree to give us authority to
check all the plane ourselves without automatically accepting the FAA
approval”.

I just hope it will give us better oversight, Boeing, Airbus, newcomers from
China etc ... We can’t afford so many death for such stupid reasons. The max
fiasco is really an insult to the entire industry, and I’m sure many “older”
people in Boeing feel ashamed of how far their company has fallen.

~~~
Nokinside
Trump attempted to nominate his personal pilot to run FAA. When it did not go
trough, FAA was run by acting director until this July.

Trump government seems to sell influence in government organizations to
companies they are supposed to oversee, so I don't know if Stephen Dickson is
step for better or worse.

~~~
nolok
When the FAA asked for a software fix after they decided there was an issue
after the first crash they came to an agreement with Boeing for a January
deadline. Boeing didn’t deliver, the FAA didn’t do anything. In March the
second crash happened. This alone is horrible to think about.

~~~
raverbashing
Or the fact that Boeing determined that the lack of a functioning AOA Disagree
(by mistake, it was only operational for customers that have the AOA
indicator) did not constitute a safety issue.

------
CaliforniaKarl
I think this isn't just a test of Boeing, it's a test of the FAA. If the EASA
finds issues that the FAA didn't (either because they were missed, or not
brought up), that'll hurt the FAA's reputation even more.

~~~
nolok
If the EASA finds real major issue that the FAA didn’t find then the FAA being
the world validation office for Boeing planes is over.

But I don’t think this will happen, the FAA seem to have realized how angry
the rest of the world agencies are. 350 dead because they screwed up, and
their first reaction was to say it was the dead pilots fault...

~~~
neuronic
The era of American exceptionalism is coming to an end and Americans are
screeching from the pain. As technology leader and economic powerhouse, the US
has left its cultural, political and financial footprint in Europe in the past
decades but the extent of that influence is now downgraded. And the reason is
inner decay.

When the wall came down in Eastern Germany, we tuned into Knight Rider and
MacGyver. The A-Team and the Power Rangers were on and life seemed to change
for the better as the German East experienced American liberalism after
decades of authoritarianist socialism.

I glorified America growing up and as a 11 year old. In 2000, I was more
excited to see the Statue of Liberty the first time than for any Christmas
before. Nothing came close to seeing the city of my childhood heroes (the
Ghostbusters) and seeing WTC/Empire State when driving in from JFK.

But 9/11 happened and somehow America sold its soul. Not that Gulf War or
Vietnam didn't happen, but it changed everything about the tiny bits of the
_amazing_ USA that I had always imagined. Post-9/11 I ended up living for
nearly 6 years in the US and all the problems became apparent to me as a
growing teenager. America was not nearly as great as propaganda made it out to
be.

Back home in Europe, I never once worried about health. Going to the doc was
normal and expected. Emergency procedures were performed without a second
thought to cost. In the US, I was billed $800 for 3 stitches when I cut my
thumb (deeply) and I got lucky because university ambulance transported me.

In Europe, in my hometown of around 1 million people, I got into problems with
bullies and ran into thieves/thugs and it definitely sucked.

But in the US, I experienced muggings at gun point, one mass shooting (~13
dead), one fatal stabbing on campus, one robbery in my SO's home, arson in the
house across my street and one meth lab explosion... it felt absolutely
surreal (happened all in Binghamton, NY - not really a prime example of a
blossoming economy, I know).

In classes, people were overtly concerned with political correctness and
yelled at Middle Eastern history professors for using specific "offending"
terms. Also, excluding God from the evolutions lecture was a highlight. Every
single international student felt cringe and embarrassment when that
Midwestern girl yelled at 300 people that evolution is just a theory and
intelligent design ought to be taught with as much dedication and she feels
offended.

Personally, America often felt like it was run by corrupt cronies who
torpedoed education where ever possible. College is a for-profit business
rather than an investment into the next generation of citizens. It felt so
weird and I think the social cracks that were apparent 15 years ago are now
leading to structural failure in society.

There are many smart and capable people in the US. Whether they did amazing
stuff for their local hospital, took part in the Apollo program or engineered
comms for Lockheed Martin. I met so many amazing folks. I hope that their
rational influence can be stronger again.

Now I will go back and concern myself with Europe's own massive problems. I
carry the US in my heart, as I lived there for half a decade. I hope that the
country is in a local minimum right now and that the path out is already in
view.

~~~
vinay427
> In the US, I was billed $800 for 3 stitches when I cut my thumb (deeply) and
> I got lucky because university ambulance transported me.

I was billed about that much, also in "Europe", when an ambulance was called,
no treatment was performed on me, and I wasn't even transported by the
ambulance. This was in Switzerland despite having health insurance. There's no
general European health insurance system.

~~~
missjellyfish
Switzerland is not part of the EU, so different rules apply. As far as I know,
a EU health insurance would have covered you (retroactively; as in: pay $800
and send the invoice + proof of payment to your insurance and you'd get
reimbursed), but when traveling outside the EU it is always a good Idea to
carry a travel health insurance with you that covers these.

~~~
vinay427
I think you may have misunderstood. I'm talking about having Swiss health
insurance in Switzerland. The standards for health insurance and cost for
treatment in "Europe" are not always lower than in the US as the parent
commenter implied.

------
jwr
This is excellent news. The FAA has lots its credibility by rubber-stamping
whatever Boeing said in recent years. This will both mean an independent
review (and re-certification of what is a effectively different airplane) and
additional pressure on the FAA to actually do its job.

~~~
AmVess
Not recent years. Decades. FAA has been under regulatory capture by Boeing for
decades.

The world ignoring anything the FAA has to say about anything is a stance
that's long overdue.

~~~
vinay427
> FAA has been under regulatory capture by Boeing for decades.

> The world ignoring anything the FAA has to say about anything is a stance
> that's long overdue.

I don't see how the second part follows from the first. Can you elaborate on
how regulatory capture by Boeing affects FAA regulations on everything they
do?

~~~
michaelt
If, due to regulatory capture, the FAA has been wrongly approving Boeing
designs, the rest of the world is wise not to blindly accept FAA approval.

Of course, outside of the specific domain of approving Boeing designs, if the
FAA says something _isn 't_ safe, or produces a report on a crash or suchlike,
the world may want to pay heed.

------
broahmed
Good. The FAA should have realized their insistence that the 737 Max was safe
to fly despite evidence otherwise was likely to shake both confidence and
respect for them as a regulatory body. It shouldn't have taken the
intervention of the President for them to do their job.

Time for them to reap what they've sown.

~~~
jacquesm
> It shouldn't have taken the intervention of the President for them to do
> their job.

That's your takeaway of what happened?

My takeaway is that the president 'intervened' only after it was clear that
the combined Boeing/FAA/US position became untenable after _other_ regions
local air authorities and airlines declared the plane unfit to fly.

Trump threw the FAA under the bus to make himself look good, but the weeks
before he was pressuring them to keep the planes flying on behalf of Boeing.

[https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/03/surprise-trump-
kept-...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/03/surprise-trump-kept-737-max-
jets-flying-after-personal-call-from-boeing-ceo)

~~~
nolok
Agreed, they didn’t do it when the risk became clear, they didn’t do it after
several big European countries banned it, they only changed their position
once the ban was moved at the entire EU level. By that point they were getting
their thunder stolen by the EASA and it felt protecting themselves was a much
bigger motivation than protecting the passengers for who they actually work
for.

~~~
notimetorelax
I wonder how much pressure airline companies put on FAA to ground the plane as
I remember people getting very concerned about flying on that plane.

------
generatorguy
The EASA says there is “still no appropriate response to Angle of Attack
integrity issues.”

I can’t believe they haven’t got a plan yet!

~~~
dvdbloc
I wish we had a graph of their attrition rate since the incidents occurred

~~~
appleflaxen
Whose attrition rate? The EASA? Boeing?

~~~
ClumsyPilot
Boeing I guess, maybe FAA. Why would ESA loose people from this?

~~~
Retric
EASA rubber stamping the FAA’s rubber stamping of Boeing is still EASA making
a mistake just as much as it’s the FAA’s mistake. This has become a major
public issue, bet the problems started when the aircraft entered service.

~~~
throwaway5752
It's nowhere near as big of a mistake on the EASA's part. You don't understand
how international regulatory and standards bodies interact with each other.

There are explicit agreements between the EASA and FAA in order to reduce
duplicated work
([https://www.faa.gov/news/updates/?newsId=88965](https://www.faa.gov/news/updates/?newsId=88965))

This is extremely bad. It it will be bad for any US regulated product used in
EU markets like food, medical devices and equipment, pharmaceuticals, among
others.

~~~
Retric
These agreements don’t require EASA to accept everything FAA does.

From your link: _each entity performs a “validation” of certification
activities._

~~~
throwaway5752
Do you know what validation means in that context? Not to be glib, but
"validation" and "verification" and "certification" are not common language in
those contexts and have fairly precise meanings. It does not mean they will
perform the test again, and in practice probably means they will review the
activities in the certification with the assumption that "qualified persons"
planned and conducted it. Essentially, an agreement that the FAA was competent
and trustworthy with minimal checks to ensure that was the case. That has
actually been historically very reasonable and sensible, and this is a rebuke
to the FAA from the EASA. It will raise costs and time for US airframes to get
to EU markets, which essentially means globally.

edit: not precisely my area of expertise, so corrections welcomed

------
olliej
This is the long term cost of the defunding of the FAA and delegation of
certifying a company's aircraft to that company. As we move forward fewer and
fewer other countries will feel that deferring to US agencies is the wrong
call and will move to (in this case) EASA.

I wouldn't be surprised if more and more other countries start looking into
approvals from US agencies, and investigating how independent those agencies
actually are :-/

~~~
jacquesm
It is more that this was the cost of failing to operate the FAA as an
independent entity, but to get it to rubberstamp Boeing's airworthyness on
behalf of Trump after it was clear that there were issues.

------
yourapostasy
I wonder how much Boeing's strategy to reduce regulatory oversight as much as
possible is going to cost Boeing shareholders going forward.

Share price may have benefited for a few decades, but Boeing's image will be
tarred with this for quite a few decades with far higher certification costs
_worldwide_ in numerous jurisdictions. There are many potential jurisdictions
[1] looking out for their own interests, and may choose to defensively force a
certification on Boeing instead of trusting the FAA.

That will cost Boeing a lot of money. If the 737 line is continued at all,
every single 737 variant that comes out after this will have a really steep
hill of sales objections to climb, and they'll be handing out steeper
discounts and lower profits to counter those objections. It may turn out that
accepting an adversarial relationship with the FAA instead of lobbying to co-
opt it was the optimal profit strategy in the long-term.

If it pans out this way, then the optimal profit strategy is to encourage the
most stringent regulatory regime in the corporation's home country that all
others hold up as the gold standard and follow without question. This avoids
the multiple costs individual certification efforts rack up because no one can
trust each others' certification results because they all recognize they're
too weakened by industrial lobbying efforts.

A strong, quasi-centralized regulatory body then acts as the company's buffer
to buy the benefit of the doubt, an insurance policy against a prolonged
period when the company's culture is called into question.

[1]
[http://www.dgca.nic.in/Global_Links.pdf](http://www.dgca.nic.in/Global_Links.pdf)

------
xxpor
Frankly, this is good IMO. It should also go in reverse. The FAA should have
to independently certify Airbus/Embraer too.

~~~
rurounijones
You got downvoted heavily, I suspect, because you left out the _reasoning_
behind your statement.

Do you think it should be the other way around in tit-for-tat political
reasons? Or because "Many eyes makes all bugs shallow" or some other reason?

~~~
xxpor
Good point. Completely for many eyes reasons. Nearly everything in a plane has
a backup. Why not do 2 independent analyses of the systems?

The timeline for a new plane is already measured in years. Another 6 months
can't be that bad, right?

------
paggle
Why wouldn't they? The FAA has lost its credibility and can now be considered
a subsidiary of Boeing.

~~~
PedroBatista
This is unfortunately accurate.

And has been for more or less 20 years.

~~~
paggle
Yes, the upside of the terrible MAX crashes is that it was a good alert that
the FAA is not trustworthy. Without them, we might have been relying on a
smoke detector with a dead battery.

------
lefty2
People may not realise that Boeing was depending on a October return to
service for the 737. If that doesn't happen it has to shut down it's
production line and that's going to be expensive. They had put a lot of
pressure on the FAA to quickly approve their latest changes.

------
mannykannot
Having to satisfy EASA as well as the FAA is big enough a threat that it might
actually be the stick to get Boeing to back off on its regulation-busting
behavior.

On the other hand, can we expect US trade sanctions against the EU in response
to this move?

------
Angostura
As a matter of interest, does the FAA accept EASA's certification of Airbus
planes? I foresee a possible tit for tat.

~~~
notimetorelax
I think this should not matter. The primary objective is safety.

~~~
Angostura
It should. I could see an embarrassed FAA opting to drop reciprocity to try
and avoid looking (so) bad.

~~~
dahart
That would make the FAA look bitter and petty in addition to incompetent, it
would trumpet their embarrassment and make them look worse than they already
do, not avoid it or hide it. But in the long term, agency politics aside, it
would be better for all of us if these agencies did independent reviews.

------
Havoc
Makes sense given FAA recent history

------
everybodyknows
EASA budget for 2018 was only 161 million Euros:

[https://www.easa.europa.eu/the-agency/the-
agency](https://www.easa.europa.eu/the-agency/the-agency)

OP offers no hint just how such great additional effort is to be paid for.

~~~
theYipster
The FAA and EASA have very different operating models, so budgets are not
comparable. FAA certification efforts are tax-payer funded, whereas EASA’s
efforts are funded by industry in a pay-for-service model.

~~~
rswail
Regulators paid by the industry they regulate is the most obvious of perverted
incentives that I can think of.

Air transport safety supervision and regulation should be paid for by those
using it, ie by taxes on the end user.

