. >>> this is mary schiavo. good morning to you. >> good morning. >> remind people about the hearings yesterday. what was the purpose of specifically looking at boeing? >> the purpose of the hearing, there's many folds to it, but in particular the senate needs to be looking at whether the delegation of the authority to boeing to oversee a large portion of its operations and for safety certification should continue or whether they need to make changes. there were a lot of questions aimed at that. >> how much oversight power does the faa give? >> unfortunately, almost entirely. there have been many studies. in fact, back when i was inspector general we did a review of the boeing certification of the boeing 777. it's now a 25-year-old plane. we found that boeing had 95-98% self-certification. congress endorsed it to turn over to boeing and other manufacturers and certain processes of airlines the ability to self-certify, to inspect itself, to certify that it has met the parameters of the faa, that it has met the re

department of transportation and cnn transportation analyst, mary skoo schiavo. thanks very much, mary. following this story has been fascinating and a little disturbing, because what's become clear, beyond boeing's mistakes, is the faa's involvement here, really, or just the way the system was set up, where the airline cedes so much control to the airline. there's been some reporting that they wrote the language of the law ceding control to the airline here. tell us the problem with that. >> well, you're exactly right. you know, this problem has been so long in the making that, you know, working on this case is very fascinating, because the wheels were put in motion for boeing's failure years before because the faa and remember, in concert with congress and the senate, delegated to boeing, the authority to approve almost every part of this plane. and by doing this delegation, then the faa was not aware of crucial changes in the mcas system that pushed the nose down even further. and even when boeing became aware of these problems, before the lionair crash and cer