alt Hacker NewsI perused that document. It says quite a bit on how the FAA needs to work on type certificates, but seems limited to that. It says nothing on airworthiness certificates. I'm assuming you know this, but the reason people say there's a hard difference on this is because they really are two different topics covering two different things.
For the uninitiated, and simplified. For a particular aircraft you are about to board to be legally allowed to fly it needs an airworthiness certificate. An airworthiness certificate says _that_ particular airplane is essentially _identical_ to a prototype (or set of identical prototypes) that the manufacture has flight tested and demonstrated is safe to the certifying authority. The formal acceptance of the prototypes safety is called a "Type" certificate.
The ability to say "we made this identical to our prototypes" is what the FAA is restoring the authority of Boeing to self certify, and is a _normal_ thing for a manufacturer to have. It's _abnormal_ for a manufacturer to not have that, as it's the certifying authority basically saying "you don't know how to physically construct airplanes".
The document referenced says the FAA essentially accepted proofs / was pressured to accept assertions from Boeing that the type was actually safe, when it was not. That's basically saying Boeing didn't know how to _design_ aircraft.
Right, but the crux of OIG's finding is that there isn't a hard difference between the two.
The plane was not built to the spec that FAA type-certified. But at the same time it wasn't clearly out of certification either.
There were significant changes made to MCAS since the the type certification. However, there was no clear delineation of what types of post-certification changes would require another FAA type certification.
The permeability of the two types of certifications and the amount of design changes that can happen between them is the entire problem OIG is pointing out.
> FAA essentially accepted proofs / was pressured to accept assertions from Boeing that the type was actually safe
No, the document says Boeing's ODA team was pressured to accept assertions from Boeing's management. The Boeing ODA team is employed by Boeing. They are given de facto self-certification authority either by actually self-certifying (in the airworthiness case), or by choosing what it flags to FAA for external certification (in the design/type case).