Will come to order. I ask unanimous consent that the chair be authorized to declare recess recesses in todays hearing. And i also ask that the ranking chair member be recognized for a minute each during first round of questions. Without objection, so ordered. Before i begin, i want to expla explain an administrative matter regarding some of the documents we may use in todays hearing and may be entered into the record. Ill be making two unanimous consent requests in reference to two document lists, list a and list b. First, the documents contained on list b are marked export control. Weve been advised by the house General Council that the constitution provides ample authority for us to release these documents and the documents from boeing, boeings attorneys agreed to the release of these documents. I see nothing that is export sensitive in these documents. The faa stamped every document and they sent us as export control. However, to prevent confusion with regard to documents with markings on them, i will be making a unanimous consent request regarding to the export control act and second, ill be making a unanimous consent request to enter the documents on list a into the hearing record. This list includes the export control documents on list b as well as additional documents. The Ranking Members staff is aware and has reviewed all these documents and theyre on both lists and with that, i ask unanimous consent that the documents on list b be disclosed pursuant to 50 u. S. Code section mr. Chairman . Yes . I want to reserve my right to object at this point. The gentleman is recognized. The reason for doing that is weve had two at least two, two that i can remember, hearings noting chinas infiltration of american industries, and that includes rail, maritime, transit, you name it and the most and they would love to have the opportunity to get their hands on technology from the aviation industry, as well and it concerns me in a big deal. We have talked about this does gone over this. In making these documents, these documents have all been made available to everyone in the committee and putting them out there in the public domain, i think is its a real problem. I do, and i think were cutting ourselves off at the legs when it comes to that technology. It concerns me in a big way and i really want us to think about that moving forward. Having said that, i will withdraw i will withdraw my right to object and allow this to move forward. Do i want to go forward and i do want to get the answers so ill remove that request. I thank the gentleman, and i didnt take a backseat to anybody in the issues regarding china. I voted against most favorite nation status and opposed them going into the wto. Ive raised concerns for decades about their theft of u. S. Technology and their unfair trade practices, so i certainly share the gentlemans concerns. I have reviewed these documents and i dont think theres anything in there that will be of any utility to the chinese, but in any case, i recognize your concerns. So i just have to finish reading this. List b will be pursuant to section 20h2b2. Without objection, so ordered and i enter all of the documents into the hearing record. Without objection, so ordered. Lets proceed now to the hearing. I first want to recognize the families who are here today. Ive met twice with families and i dont know if im met with all of you here today, and i want to convey my utmost condolences. Its one year and one day after the lion air crash. A very somber day. We shouldnt have to be here, but we are and were going to get to the bottom of this and were going to mix it and were going to see that it never happens again. With that, i would thank the witnesses for being here. Mr. Mullenburg, and mr. Hamilton. This fourth hearing, the committee has held for the First Full Committee Hearing and given the extraordinary interest i felt it best to do it in full committee. I know that boeing told us that they wanted to wait until the airplane was ungrounded, but i felt it was very important for them to testify before that happened. We are here today because 346 people, sons, fathers, daughter, mothers died on two max aircraft within a fivemonth period. Something went drastically wrong. As you know, our committee has been conducting a very robust investigation and been on this committee a long tile. Weve never undertaken an investigation of this magnitude to the best of my knowledge in the hifty roo of this committee which is the second oldest committee in the u. S. Kong, and we have received hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from boeing. They have been cooperative in providing those documents and agreeing that we could use those documents in the public hearing and we have received tens of thousands of pages from the faa. We have conducted some hearings with faa employees. We have others we wish to interview, and we are we have requested to interview boeing employees and we are told that we have to be in line behind the justice department. So those are still forthcoming. There are a lot of Unanswered Questions that we need to get to the bottom of. You know, we know that a novel system, a new and novel system called mcas took these two planes into an uncontrollable altitude after it repeatedly triggered, having to do with a faulty or missing sensor. These were wired to one, in the it was wired to one sensor and in may, and then acting administrator elwell was there and i asked him was mcass a safety critical system . He said yes. Then how could it be approved to trigger with a single point of failure . He had no answer to that. Highway could the faa approve it . How could the manufacturer do that . He had no good answer and that will be, we will continue to pursue the roots of this problem. We do know that at one point, boeing had planned to inform pilots about mcas and it was in the first version of the flight manual and when it became a radical system which could trigger the catastrophic failure, it came out. Some of that was discussed in the senate yesterday and it will be discussed here today, particularly quoting from boeings chief test pilot and his instant messages seems inexplicable. Secondly, we do know that boeing engineers actually proposed placing a an mcas enunciator in the cockpit. But again, that came out. In later versions or in the actual production version and then it wasnt until after lion air that boeing informed anyone and still at that point i think soft peddling mcas that was on the planes. Ive talked to pissed off pilots. We were back up . How can we be backup if we dont know if something will take over our plane. There is quite a bit of discontent in the Aviation Community about that. We now know that boeing and the faa assume pilots would appropriately react in four seconds. Four seconds. But boeing had information which well get to a little later in this hearing that some pilots might react in ten seconds or longer, and if that happens, the results would be catastrophic and result in the loss of the aircraft as happened twice. We now know that the planes development and boeing was they had a phone call. The phone call was, hey, major customer. Were going to buy airbus. They have a better fuel economy and the pilots dont need retraining which is very expensive and disruptive of our schedules. So bowing from day one had to meet that instead of a clean sheet airplane. They got the 12th or 13th iteration of the 737 amendedtype certificate. That meant big engines mounted forward and flies differently and they had to develop a system to make it fly like the others so it wouldnt go through Pilot Training or recertification and that drove the whole process. We do know that boeing offered Southwest Airlines 1 million per plane rebate. If the pilots had to be retrained. Imagine what the pressures were from the top on down to mid level and lowlevel engineers and youre saying, what . No. Cant have that. It cost us a million bucks a plane and maybe the other contracts had the same provision and it cost us the markets advantage and slows things down. And then, you know, theres been a lack of candor all through this. Boeing learned that the aoa angle of attack disagreed light which was a standard feature on all boeing 737s did not work on this plane unless someone bought the upgraded package. We are told that was inadvertent Software Error in the upgraded package. But that may be so. But boeing decided to delay the fix for three years until 2020. They didnt tell the faa. They didnt tell the kiscustome and they didnt tell the pilots about this until after the lion air crash. Thats inexplicable. You know . They say well, its not necessary for safe operation of the max, but keeping everybody in the dark and having that there it is. Its there, right in front of the pilot and its not lighting up. Well, it cant light up. And it was included in the flight manual unlike mmcass. You include something in the manual that is going to work and something was not in the manual. What is that about . We know there was tremendous pressure production and boeing whistleblowers have contacted us regarding features, engineers wanted to put on the max, but were denied because of the rush to get this plane out the door and compete. We have from internal whistleblower a survey conducted november 16 that 39 of boeing employees surveyed had experienced undue pressure and 29 said they were concerned about consequences, you might lose your job, i guess. If they reported these. We now know at least one case where a boeing manager implored the Vice President general manager of the 737 program to shut down the 737 max production line because of safety concerns several months before the first tragic lion air crash. Theres a lot we dont know. We dont know what would happen if a different path had been followed here exactly. We dont know if these pilot his had the system what would happen. We dont know why boeing designed a plane where a critical, safety critical system assigned to a single point of failure, inexplicable and inexcusable and as far as i know, in the passenger aviation product and we have seen pressures from wall street, Market Forces have a way of influencing the decisions of the best companies in the worst way, endangering the public, jeopardizing the good work of countless, countless hardworking employees on the factory lines and i hope thats not the story that is ultimately going to be written about this longadmired company. So we need today, mr. Mullenburg, and mr. Hampton. We need answers, but we also know that we need reforms on how commercial aircraft are certified and how manufacturers, not just boeing and all are watched and overseen by the regulators. This hearing today, an investigation is not just about getting answers to our questions, but how to make the systems safer and prevent future tragedies. With that, i yield time to the Ranking Member. Thank you, mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing. I do want to extend my condolences to the families, and friends of the accident victims, i cant imagine how hard it is to just sit and go through this process. Im going to divert from my statement for just a minute and associate myself with a couple of comments that he made, and i too, being a pilot and having an equipment in the cockpit that enabout is something that concerns me in a big way and that comment that pilots, were the backup system, it does concern me, but i do want to point out, though, as well that when it comes to airbus because it was mentioned, too, that airbus, you know, there were customers that wanted to look at airbus as opposed to the boeing product, but the pilot is the backup system. You cant shut it off ask the sa similar system thats in a boeing max mcas. You cant shut it off. It overrides the pilot. Overrides the pilot. Whereas mcas can be shut off, you want to be able to shut a system off which has failed and be able to fly the airplane and thats what ive harped on over and over and over again and it is my hope that mr. Mullenburgs testimony today will help us understand the decisions that boeing made between 2009, 2017 regarding the design and certification of the 737 max. Some of those decisions were reviewed and approved by the boeing organization and the Designation Authority of the ada and we keep using that term, obviously. Its on behalf of the faa ask while the boeing oda was authorized to act for the faa as a regulator of the faa, they retain the ultimate responsibility for overseeing the compliance of all safety regulations. I know the term edz we have a lot of other people to hear from and were sear are here in front of the boeing Leadership Today and to gets complete ebb picture, i would like to be with the faa officials at the time between 12 and 20 fen with these did get a commitment and i hope you dont have a problem. We have to hear from everybody. Thats the bottom line. Ive read before, the many times. If these reinvest gaegs reveal problems with certification then i think congress should act to fix those specific and identifiable problems and thats going to be the issue is identifying what those problems are, but in the aftermath of these accidents we cant address the safety by focusing on one single factor that contributes to an accident. Ive heard Safety Experts refer to, you know, the swiss cheese model of accident causation. In this model, ifio you use this model, we have layers. Many layers of accident protection that are visual. If you visualize them as slices of cheese, with holes it represents the weaknesses and others are due to active fail urs, but when an accident occurs, when all of those holes and weaknesses, when they line up. When they line up thats when you have a catastrophic failure and in the context of the 737 max, we have to consider all of those layers, all of them when it comes to the protection and safety and you know, we try to determine what weaknesses are out there and try to figure out what those weaknesses are. As an investigator, the indonesian government said about the lion air accident and i quote, if one of those nine contributing factors did not happen the crash would not have happened. One particular layer that designed the certification of the 737 max, thats the focus of a number of investigations. Earlier this year, boeing took responsibility for the mcas design weaknesses and theyve been working on a software fix which we were waiting to hear about that, but other weaknesses, boeing with the faas oversight, you know, that were going to address include pilot displays and operation manuals and crew training and today well hear about the status of all of those efforts, but i want to hear about how these efforts line up with the recommendations of the joint authoritys technical review and the first completed review of the max certification by individuals with fast aviation and technical, per tees thats due out and is obviously due soon. While the jtar didnt call for an end to the faas delegation programs and they did highlight some bureaucratic efficiencies between boeing and the faa and we have to address those and i know we will. And the faa, theyre concerned the faa concurred with the jtars report and is committed to working on these recommendations which is good. We obviously have to make oversight to make sure that happens and lastly, i want to hear about recently shared documents with the chief technical pilot with the 737 and im sure youre going to do that, but other investigations are moving forward as well, and last month, the National Transportation safety board issued a recommendation report which largely focused on the assumptions that were made during the design and certification process related to human factors. Designed and certification cannot be the soul focus of our efforts and ive said this before. Thats only one layer of that choose model that i talked about. In the last few months, other weaknesses that appeared to have played a role in these accidents have surfaced. Reports called into question evidence submitted to the lion air investigation which related to the installation, calibration and testing of the faulty angle of attack sensor and theres also been whistleblower statements and other reports raising significant concerns with lion air and Ethiopian Airlines operation and maintenance programs. The former chief engineer for Ethiopian Airlines filed a whistleblower complaint alleging significant problems with the maintenance, training and recordkeeping. He also alleges that the air carrier went into the maintenance records of the 737 and went into the maintenance records a day after the accident. And unfortunately, operational pressures and the lack of robust Safety Culture negatively impacted aviation safety and thats another layer of that model that i talked about. The ntsb has confirmed that along with certification, operational factors will be the focus of its accident investigations and in addition, along with its own max certification review, the department of transportation and their ig and their Inspector General at the request of their committees leadership will begin a review of the International Training standards with the impact of automation which is another thing that ive talked about as a potential problem, but i want to be Crystal Clear in reviewing these areas that this is not an effort to blame the pilots and i dont absolve boeing of its responsibility and it described the changing nature of the Airline Industry and the impact its having on airmanship. The article refers to a decadelong transformation of business of flying where airplanes became so automated and accidents so rare that a cheap, air travel boom was able to take route, and this booming air traft resulted in the need for more and more pilots and the pool of experienced pilots and i remember getting letters from airlines all over the world just simply because i had atp on my license and getting letters offering me jobs to get what i was doing and come fly for them, but ill continue to repeat this. Pilots can master Cockpit Technology and when the technology fails, they have to be able to fly the plane and want just fly the computer and to be clear, none of this is a reflection on lion air or ethiopias pilots professionalism or character. Theyre flying for their lives and thats the bottom line. Instead, its a reflection in the broader pressures thats present today and its incumbent on the airline whose name is on the side of that airplane to ensure that their pilots are properly trained to the level