The head of the National Transporation Safety Board (NTSB) has slammed the Federal Aviation Administration over allegations that the agency failed to take a jammed rudder system affecting some Boeing 737 planes seriously enough.
In a new letter to FAA administrator Michael Whitaker, the chair of the NTSB, Jennifer Homendy, says she was “disappointed” that the FAA apparently didn’t take any action over the rudder system issue until the NTSB issued an urgent safety alert last week.
The FAA has, however, known about the issue since February when the rudder pedals on a four-year-old Boeing 737MAX-8 operated by United Airlines became briefly stuck as the pilots attempted to land the jet at Newark Airport.
Although investigations are still ongoing, the NTSB was able to release a preliminary report into the incident only weeks after the occurrence.
That report concluded that a sealed bearing within the rudder system actuator had been incorrectly assembled. As a result, moisture could get into the actuator, and at high altitudes, there was a risk of the actuator freezing up.
The NTSB says that 353 faulty actuators have been delivered from the manufacturer Collins Aerospace to Boeing since 2017. Some of the faulty actuators were still in storage at Boeing, but as many as 271 affected parts may have been installed on planes operated by as many as 40 different foreign carriers.
United Airlines says it has already replaced any faulty actuators on its 737 fleet but the NTSB fears that there may still be 16 faulty actuators installed on US-registered aircraft.
“I remain concerned that the FAA, as a whole, did not take this issue more seriously until we issued our urgent safety recommendation report, despite the risk of loss of control of an aircraft or departure from the runway occurring due to a hammed or restricted rudder control system,” Homendy blasted in her letter to Whitaker on Monday.
“Although out investigation is ongoing, I am disappointed that it does not appear that the FAA has initiated urgent actions to address the risk of jammed rudder controls in the 6 months since our preliminary report on this incident was issued.”
Homendy revealed that two similar incidents involving faulty rudder system actuators occurred in 2019 and that the FAA had failed to take action despite being aware of these occurrences in the last six months.
In fact, Homendy even suggested that the FAA had been “downplaying the urgency of this issue” even though faulty actuators were still in service.
Homendy also took the time to yet again criticize aircraft manufacturer Boeing over its failure to tell United Airlines and other carriers that they had 737 airplanes equipped with faulty actuators that were mechanically connected to the rudder control system.
“Not making operators fully aware of the installed system and equipment on the airplanes delivered to them is unacceptable and cannot continue to be tolerated,” Homendy’s letter concluded.
Boeing currently tells pilots to overpower a jammed rudder by using ‘maximum force,’ but the NTSB fears that this recommended course of action could cause a “sudden, large, and undesired rudder deflection that could unintentionally cause loss of control or departure from a runway.”
A preliminary report into the United Airlines incident was published in March, but the NTSB says that the investigation is still ongoing.
