Editorial: Red faces at FAA/Eclipse hearing
The congressional hearing in Washington last month about the process that led to FAA certification of the Eclipse 500 took the lid off the FAA’s sausage-ma
The congressional hearing in Washington last month about the process that led to FAA certification of the Eclipse 500 took the lid off the FAA’s sausage-making apparatus, and it was a decidedly unappetizing spectacle.
To hear DOT IG Calvin Scovel tell it, there was skullduggery at the top as the agency charged with ensuring the safety of civil aviation fast-tracked the signoff paperwork for a radically new and heavily computer-dependent type of airplane designed and built by a company that was painfully new to the game. FAA senior management, Scovel asserted, circumvented the expertise of experienced people in the front lines–inspectors whose opinion it was that the airplane was not yet ready to be unleashed on the flying public.
