Boeing 737 max declared safe to fly again

The Boeing 737 Max airliner was cleared to fly again on, 20 months after two disasters that exposed lethal design flaws.

Maxes parked at the Boeing factory in Renton, Washington, on Thursday. Picture: AFP

The Boeing 737 Max airliner was cleared to fly again on Thursday Australian time, 20 months after two disasters that exposed lethal design flaws, poor management and oversight failures by the American aviation regulator.

The US Federal Aviation Administration said it was satisfied that software changes and extra training had made the twin-engine jet immune to the malfunctions that led to crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia in 2018 and 2019, in which a total of 346 passengers and crew were killed.

Steve Dickson, the FAA chief, said the regulator “has done everything humanly possible to make sure” this type of crash does not happen again.

A former airline pilot, Mr Dickson flew the revised airliner in October and pronounced it ­satisfactory.

The changes to the jet “make it impossible for the airplanes to have the same kind of accidents”, he told NBC News.

Airlines must implement the modifications before their planes can take off again. The changes are aimed at preventing the flight control system from pushing the aircraft’s nose downwards and overriding pilots’ attempts to stop it, as happened in the two crashes.

Investigators in the Indo­nesian and Ethiopian crashes showed that the pilots failed to disarm the manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system after it was activated by faulty data and sent their aircraft diving. Only after the first crash were ­pilots told of the existence of the MCAS system, which had been designed to give the aircraft the same handling feel as the previous model of the long-serving 737 series.

American Airlines is planning to start the first new Max service on December 29 with a daily round trip between New York and Miami, but its full return will be gradual because the corona­virus pandemic has drastically cut air travel globally. Fears over the Max may also lead passengers to shun it, industry experts said.

The European Aviation Safety Agency has voiced informal approval of the fixes and is expected to reauthorise flights by the end of the year. Regulators in China and Brazil are likely to follow.

Nearly 400 Max jets, Boeing’s bestseller, were in service worldwide when they entered the longest grounding in commercial aviation. Boeing has built and stored about 450 since then. ­Orders for hundreds more have been cancelled.

Boeing and the FAA said they had learnt their lesson from the failures. An 18-month investi­gation by a congressional committee found that Boeing had a “culture of concealment”, and put pressure on engineers to rush the jet on to the market to compete with Airbus.

The FAA had been complacent and allowed Boeing engineers to certify their own work, the investigation found. Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing’s chief executive, was sacked last December and replaced by David Calhoun.

Mr Calhoun said on Thursday: “We will never forget the lives lost in the two tragic accidents that led to the decision to suspend operations. These events and the lessons we have learned as a result have reshaped our company and further focused our attention on our core values of safety, quality and integrity.”

Relatives of passengers who died in the crashes said they had no confidence in the safety of the revamped airliner. “The aggressive secrecy of the FAA means we cannot believe the Boeing 737 Max is safe,” said Michael Stumo, whose daughter died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March 2019. “We were told the plane was safe when certified in March 2017 and again after the Lion Air crash in October 2018. ‘Just trust us’ does not work any more.”

The Times