On The Issue: A Talk with Pulitzer Prize Winner Dominic Gates: Quality Culture

Walter Morris talks to Dominic Gates just after his presentation at the 2023 PDA/FDA Joint Regulatory Conference. Mr. Gates won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting about the internal quality problems at Boeing that contribute to the deadly crashes of 2 737 MAX aircraft.

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Around the 18 minute mark in the video, Dominic talks about delegation of authority. Prior to 2005, the FAA delegated authority to specific Boeing engineers who were selected by the FAA based on a history of trust and confidence with those individual engineers. That contributed to higher emphasis on the integrity that Dominic talks about, Under the new ODA system for delegation of authority, the FAA delegates authority to the organization (ODA) at Boeing. Boeing, not the FAA, chooses the engineers who find compliance with FAA rules. The FAA's history of trust and confidence applies to the organization, not to the engineers. Think about that.
All the pressures that Dominic talks about must be moderated within the Boeing ODA. The FAA can provide very little shelter from undue pressure to the engineers within the ODA.
Worse, probably, is the fact that FAA engineers have very little technical interaction with engineers at Boeing. This isolates the engineers within Boeing's ODA and it means that FAA engineers will always be at least one step behind anything going on in the design, testing of manufacture of the products.