U.S. transport chief requests inquiry into Boeing jet approval

The U.S. transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, asked her agency’s internal watchdog to conduct an audit of how the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the Boeing 737 Max 8, bringing official scrutiny to the rollout of Boeing’s high-selling jet. The inquiry is set to start soon, and a Boeing spokesman said the company would cooperate with it.

In the past five months, two Max 8s have crashed — last week in Ethiopia, killing 157 people, and in October in Indonesia, killing 189 people — under similar circumstances. The F.A.A. was slow to join the rest of the world in grounding the model. And it may face the coming scrutiny under a new leader: a former airline executive whom President Trump on Tuesday nominated to head the agency.

Controversy: The F.A.A. certified the Max 8 as safe to fly in 2017. One concern is the role Boeing employees played in the process. And there are doubts about the F.A.A.’s decision that pilots who had flown the plane’s previous version would not need training on the automated flight-control system, which in both crashes may have forced the jetliners into dives.