South Cook News

Issued the following announcement on Oct. 29.

Congressman Dan Lipinski (IL-3) released the following statement in advance of tomorrow’s House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing on the Boeing 737 Max:

“This is not court and this is not a criminal hearing, but 346 people died in two crashes of Boeing 737 Max planes that should not have been certified to fly by the FAA.  We know that Boeing manufactured planes with a safety critical component that had a single point of failure.  We know that Boeing pushed hard and successfully avoided pilot training requirements for the Max.  We have evidence that Boeing employees faced serious production pressures.  And we have evidence that during testing a pilot in a simulator experienced problems with the MCAS control system, which was what ultimately caused the two crashes.  Yet even after these crashes and the loss of 346 lives, Boeing was still defending the safety of this plane.  As I said at a hearing earlier this year, something went wrong in the certification of this plane.  Either the FAA certification process itself is at fault, Boeing is at fault in their role in the process, or both.  After I made this statement I was upbraided by some in the industry. But this committee has a responsibility to get to the bottom of what went wrong in the certification process for the 737 Max in order to make changes to that process so we can assure the public that this will not happen again. We must fulfill this responsibility, and this hearing is another piece in our process of figuring out how we do this.”