There were many “reasons” the 737 was fielded with what now appears to be a fatal flaw. Boeing has to shoulder the biggest blame and they own the internal failures created in both the design and the safety system created to mitigate the design problem.
The FAA appears to be getting far too much of the blame in public. The FAA does not have 1/100th of the engineers that Boeing does so how could they be expected to diagnose something that took the input of hundreds of people behind closed doors? The FAA should not be the patsy. The only solution would be to embed the FAA (government) within a private company (Boeing). Not acceptable unless we want to live in the world brought to life in Atlas Shrugged or Chernobyl.
It is also a stretch to blame Obama for it as Trump would have touted it also and rightfully tried to advance American industry. Could it have had some influence? Certainly. Politics taints many things within our society and one reason as advertised for the flaw in this jet is the more “environmentally friendly engines” that were too large for the aircraft creating the problem in the first place.
Just my respectfully submitted .02.
” that took the input of hundreds of people behind closed doors? “
Because it is NOT behind closed doors.
The Designated Engineering Representative (DER) of the FAA is intimately involved in the process, and there are multiple of those.
Had the 737MAX undergone normal FAA certification procedures it would never have been certified, evidenced by the “discovery” of a new flaw.
FAA granted Boeing self-certification, essentially, and they pushed through a plane with an appalling fatal defect when piloted by poorly-trained/inexperienced crews.
FAA is mostly to blame for the crashes & deaths and Boeing corporate responsible for the remaining blame (they made the design decisions to speed certification which led directly to the flawed MCAS system) and the demise of the company for putting accounting ahead of safety in dismissing so many engineers because they viewed the company as “mature”.
See the Bloomberg article also here at FR which, frankly, outlines the real causes. When an aircraft manufacturers publicly announces that it may take software or hardware (microprocessors) to fix the problem, clearly this aircraft skipped a number of basic certification steps to meet sales goals.
Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3760301/posts
“During the certification process, the FAA delegated many evaluations to Boeing, allowing the manufacturer to review their own product.[48][49] It was widely reported that Boeing pushed to expedite approval of the 737 MAX to compete with the Airbus A320neo. That aircraft hit the market nine months ahead of Boeing’s model.”
Obama got $10,000,000 + from Boeing and was running for reelection and in charge of FAA should not have given fox keys to hen house!