A House subcommittee will hear accusations this week that supervisors at the Federal Aviation Administration pressured subordinates to approve a new model of airplane prematurely, and transferred employees who raised safety concerns that might have delayed the approval. According to a summary prepared by the staff of the aviation subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the FAA "appeared to be lenient with the manufacturer" and accepted "IOUs" on systems that did not meet regulations, the NY Times reports.

The accusations echo the dispute earlier this year about how the FAA handled safety problems at Southwest Airlines. In that case, FAA supervisors improperly overruled rank-and-file inspectors and allowed the airline to keep flying planes on which inspections had been skipped. But the FAA, whose work was criticized by the subcommittee in the Southwest case, asserts that while the procedure could be improved, the plane is safe and no one was improperly pressured, reports Times writer Matthew L. Wald.

Last week, the FAA released a summary of a special review it had ordered of the approval of the new plane, the Eclipse 500. The plane is among the first of a new type of plane called a very light jet. The Eclipse is a five- or six-seat twin-engine jet, certified for operation by a single pilot, and now in service as an air taxi and corporate jet. The agency said that certification was appropriate, but that in some cases its employees did not follow procedures.

"While we made the right call in certifying this aircraft, the process we used could and should have been better coordinated," Robert A. Sturgell, the acting administrator of the agency, told the Times. The FAA headquarters reassigned some experts assigned to the project because, it said, they were not following proper procedures. The inspector general of the Transportation Department is also studying the certification, but has not released any findings.

According to the committee staff's report on the Eclipse, the computer displays in the cockpit have sometimes gone blank; the system that warns that the plane is flying too slowly or at a dangerous pitch has sometimes sounded false alarms; and the wing flaps, which are deployed to help the plane maneuver at low speeds, have sometimes failed to work. Before top FAA officials insisted that the plane be certified, agency experts had identified concerns about systems related to all these problems, according to committee investigators.

The chief executive of Eclipse Aviation at the time the plane was certified, Vern Raburn, said his company had clashed with the FAA staff because the technology was "pushing the envelope" for small planes, and the FAA staff members in charge of such planes had little experience with advanced electronics or new assembly techniques. Sometimes, Raburn told the Times, the FAA staff members handling the certification would tell him, "I don't like it because I don't understand it."