US FAA head to testify before Senate panel on Boeing oversight

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The head of the Federal Aviation Administration will testify on Sept. 25 before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on the planemaker's oversight of Boeing, a committee aide told Reuters.

The committee, led by Senator Richard Blumenthal, in June sharply questioned then Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun on the planemaker's safety record.

The hearing later this month, titled "FAA Oversight of Boeing's Broken Safety Culture", comes as FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker has ramped up scrutiny of the planemaker since a Jan. 5 mid-air emergency in a new Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 and acknowledged it should have done more before the incident.

"This is a very long term journey for Boeing. I think it's going to be measured in years not months," Whitaker told reporters on Wednesday on the sidelines of a conference in Washington, D.C.

Whitaker in February barred Boeing from boosting production of its best-selling plane and required them to submit a quality improvement plan. Whitaker also said the agency will continue increased on-site presence at Boeing for the foreseeable future.

In July, Senate Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell asked the FAA to conduct a thorough review into its oversight of Boeing and other manufacturers, raising serious questions about the government's scrutiny of the planemaker.

After the Jan. 5 mid-air emergency involving the MAX that lost a door plug at 16,000 feet, the FAA conducted a 737 MAX production audit into Boeing fuselage supplier Spirit and found multiple instances where the companies had failed to comply with manufacturing quality control requirements.

In June, Whitaker said at a Senate Commerce hearing that before January the FAA had been "too focused on paperwork audits and not focused enough on inspections" at Boeing.

The planemaker faces a potential strike as early as Friday, if most of its factory workers in the Pacific Northwest vote on Thursday to reject a much-criticized new contract, just as it wrestles with chronic production delays and mounting debt.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Sonali Paul)