That may now be the standard but in that case what role does the government agency serve if it truly is more self-regulation? That is not a nuance I had previously understood. Why have any oversight when it is all done by the OEM? Perhaps others understood this was the standard but I did not - it actually makes me question the certification process.

The FAA has a dual mandate - promoting safety and promoting the industry. The latter is much more of a driving force these days (I would say since the 80s).

Oversight.

But that means it is essentially self certification by the manufacturer. So what is the "oversight"? I am a layperson in this area, but in my professional life I have self regulation and there is a significant bite from the government agency that regulates me if I do wrong. I am only dealing with people's money not their lives.

I think this incident has highlighted to me and others that essentially the government has let the industry oversight be managed by the "inmates" (OEMs and airlines). :

So FAA certified really means Boeing certified.

No, that's not at all what it means. Read up on the DER to improve your understanding of their capabilities and limitations.

The dual mandate was removed a number of years ago. The FAA no longer has any role promoting the industry.

Very true.

From an NPR transcript from an interview with

FAA Acting Head Dan Elwell On Boeing Decision

This is a wonderful article that offers excellent insight into what I mentioned pages back. Delegation is necessary (and good) because governments lack personnel/bandwidth to deal with all of the industry churn, however, delegates are in an inherent conflict of interest because they take a pay cheque from the companies that are dependent on obtaining product approvals. Oversight of delegates by regulators is thus crucially important in ensuring they are making sound findings of compliance to airworthiness regulations, but in recent years we're seeing a major push by industry to reduce oversight (oversight is largely elective and based on a variety of risk factors). Regulators, in performing their oversight role, are constantly under pressure from industry and their own management alike to minimally/superficially review compliance data/substantiation and/or even delegate completely. The scale has tipped too far in the non-oversight direction and it's high time we bring it back into balance.

Again, wonderful article.

⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️

This. I realize I am no expert and to my layman's viewpoint the FAA has delegated the certification to the person being certified. If the FAA does not have the expertise to provide the appropriate oversight and certification why are they there?

CNN is now reporting that: Investigators find 'similarities' between Ethiopian and Lion Air crashes, official says.

Well, yes and no.

This time they are comparing instrument readings from the black boxes, which is more accurate that the data they used to ground the MAX.

Don't know who reported it first, but it's all over the news outlets. Apparently they think this "confirmation" is news.

The onus is on the FAA to earn the trust back of the flying public and not me!
 

We don't need to hide behind the complexities of DER, etc...when common sense can be used to state a simple fact: "when you deal with systems that literally carries humans by the millions every day, and that could be in danger, you need much higher regulation, not just hide behind euphemisms like 'oversight' and just having FAA managers sign-off documents without setting foot on the factory floor, and have your very own FAA test engineers check lines of code, and test systems". The Seattle Times and many other articles very clearly states that. I trust common sense commentary from people like Chris Cox, Mary Schiavo, David Susie, et.al., than reading reams and reams of DER.

Bottom line, the flying public have lost faith in this cozy relationship between the regulator and the 'regulated'. The onus is on FAA to earn the trust back...the onus is not on me to read reams of DER and get familiarized.

Given some of the things that are drifting around about the relationship(s) between Boeing and the FAA I'll expand a little bit on my post up thread:

First and foremost is you are dealing with a bureaucracy with both the FAA and Boeing which means that the amount of engineering (design, manufacturing, and operations) is a very small part of the whole organization. As I noted before the FAA is very top heavy with careerists who mostly came up from the legal or administrative side, not the actual aircraft or operations side, who have no clue as to what's happening on the flight line, the hangar or the factory floor. Not helping things is the fact that given the lack of incentives they can't get the most qualified people working for them, I'm not talking here about pay and benefits but a new hire engineer is going to be sent to a desk job approving new coffee cup designs, etc. for at least 5+ years, then might get to work a little bit in the field inspections for a while, then sent off to some mid level administrative posting, and then after they've forgotten all of their design stuff they learned in school they finally get to be part of a design review team. Unfortunately the only real source of people with the understanding of the "Real World"is with greater Boeing and Airbus( including all of their suppliers and subcontractors) or the DOD for parts of the metal issues. Given the choice almost all of the best and brightest are heading for the private sector where they're very likely to get a chance to work on something exciting in a couple of years which actually means something.

As I noted before there is a great disconnect between the newer pilots (for me it's mates and engineers) and their equipment. There's is so much automation to save us from ourselves and enforce a standard
to avoid a theoretical issue that happens every millennium that the newbies don't have a clue on how to tell when Uncle Auto is pitching a fit and then what to do next and when they figure it out then well....

Bottom line is that somebody needs to regulate things but unfortunately once you get the lawyers and bunglecrats involved the idea of KISS ( Keep It Simple Stupid) is completely out the window and things get so complicated and messed up nobody can sort out the mess and the regulators and companies are trying to fix the blame first (even different parts of the same organization) and then the problem second.

From the very many news articles, that says passengers were trying to figure out what aircraft they were on, and trying to avoid flying the MAX, before they were ground. They were calling the airlines that were not waiving change fees, but later ended up working with them on a case-by-case basis. We probably are not giving enough credit to the common folk who surprisingly are aware of what is going on...at least when it affects them. I don't think they need to know the nuances of MCAS to figure out that it is their life, their families' life on the line...so I better 'get caught trying' rather than simply giving up. Some of the earlier posts complaining of mass hysteria, in hindsight is indeed warranted.