FAA boss: No set date on Max’s return to skies
FORT WORTH — Representatives of more than 30 countries met with Federal Aviation Administration officials Thursday to hear the regulator’s approach to determining how soon the Boeing 737 Max can resume flying after two crashes that killed 346 people.
Ahead of the meeting, the head of the FAA said there’s no fixed schedule for lifting the order that has grounded the Max since March 13.
“It takes as long as it takes,” acting FAA Administrator Dan Elwell said Wednesday. “The 737 Max will fly again when we have gone through all of the necessary analysis to determine that it is safe to do so.
“If it takes a year to find everything we need to give us confidence to lift the order, then so be it,” he added.
Though the plane could potentially return to service in the U.S. as early as August, that schedule privately suggested last month by both Boeing and the FAA may have been delayed by technical hitches and public unease.
Thursday’s meeting is crucial to the agency’s hopes of convincing other regulators around the world to lift their bans on the plane soon after the FAA does.
Boeing is fixing flight control software that in each accident pushed the plane’s nose down based on faulty readings from a sensor. The company will tie the system to more than one sensor and make it less powerful — pilots for Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines, which flew the planes that crashed, were unable to counter the system’s automatic nose-down pitch.
An FAA spokesman on the sidelines of the meeting said the safety agency has a clear idea of the main elements of Boeing’s fix and knows the steps that need to be done to certify and validate Boeing’s work. How long those steps will take remains fuzzy.
Elwell said Boeing had earlier committed to deliver its software fix March 26 but at the last minute decided that it needed to make adjustments after an independent internal review found problems that needed to be addressed.
Fifty-seven delegates representing civil aviation authorities in 33 countries gathered for the meeting Thursday at the FAA’s southwest regional office in Fort Worth — including officials from China, Europe and Canada, as well as Indonesia and Ethiopia, the two countries leading the investigations into the two fatal accidents.
Elwell has said he hopes other regulators will lift their bans on the plane soon after the FAA does. But regulators in China, the European Union and Canada have said they plan to conduct their own reviews of Boeing’s software changes and the need for additional pilot training.