[quartesixte]

I know a couple of people through my professional network who hold this title and what I've gathered is that delegates have a lot of autonomy and authority. And Boeing does organize the company and even its information systems to practically treat them as FAA regulators.

And, FWIW, the type of person who ends up self-selecting into this kind of work are serious people who deeply care about airline safety. It is a rather thankless job with a lot of onerous, tedious paperwork that is not very sexy.

[_DeadFred_]

Was at a different aerospace company. Our internal people were really good. And by paperwork FYI they generated 1-2 filing cabinets worth of documentation per tail number of notes/quality checks/etc.

They could have IT set legal hold on email accounts, filesystems, PLM/MLM, etc and only us in IT and them knew, not even higher management. They could scrap $20,000 parts. It's also a small world, so chances are your internal people worked with the FAA person (who could be a consultant or full time FAA employee) at a past job so people know if trust levels are warranted.

There's also a whole other layer of oversite people might not realize. The company's insurance company (think Lloyd’s). They will have their own people who will come do on sites as well and do pretty intensive audits of everything from engineering through production.