Facing Another Boeing Crisis, the FAA Takes a Harder Line

The latest crisis involving a 737 Max jet is once again prompting scrutiny of the Federal Aviation Administration’s oversight of Boeing.

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The Federal Aviation Administration grounded scores of Boeing 737 Max 9 jets in January after a door panel blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight in midair.

When a Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed off the coast of Indonesia in 2018, killing all 189 people on board, the Federal Aviation Administration allowed other Max planes to keep flying. Less than five months later, in early 2019, another Max 8 crashed in Ethiopia, killing 157 more people. Even then, days passed before the agency halted the planes from flying.

In early January, when a door panel blew out of a Boeing 737 Max 9 jet, the F.A.A. responded far more swiftly. Within a day, it had grounded scores of similar Max 9 planes.

“That is night and day compared to what happened in 2019,” said William J. McGee, a senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project, a research and advocacy group.

The agency did not stop with the grounding. Last month, it said it would bar Boeing from increasing production of the 737 Max line until the company addressed quality control issues, a major blow to the plane maker’s ability to ramp up output as it tries to compete with its main rival, Airbus. The regulator also opened an investigation into Boeing’s compliance with safety standards and announced an audit of the Max 9 production line.

The F.A.A.’s handling of the latest Boeing crisis will come under the spotlight on Tuesday when the agency’s administrator, Mike Whitaker, testifies before a House subcommittee. Already, the door panel mishap has prompted another wave of questions from Congress about how the nation’s air safety regulator exercises its oversight role.

The agency has long relied on plane makers to conduct safety work on the government’s behalf, a practice that came under scrutiny after the Max 8 crashes and is now drawing attention once again. In the case of the incident with the Max 9, one possibility is that Boeing employees improperly reinstalled the door panel, known as a door plug, after it was opened at the plane maker’s factory in Renton, Wash. If a manufacturing lapse is found to have been at fault, the F.A.A. may face criticism over whether it sufficiently monitored Boeing’s production processes.

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