Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Boeing jet returns to U.S. skies
737 Max carries first paying passengers since ’19 grounding
American Airlines flew a Boeing 737 Max with paying passengers from Miami to New York on Tuesday, the plane’s first commercial flight in U.S. skies since it was grounded after two deadly crashes.
Flight 718 carried 87 passengers on the 172-seat plane, and the return flight from LaGuardia Airport to Miami International Airport held 151 passengers, according to an airline spokeswoman.
Sean Roskey, the pilot of the American Airlines flight, was celebrating his anniversary Tuesday, the airline said, and his wife joined him on the plane. Moraima Maldonado, the first officer, took her mother along.
Roskey told passengers before taking off that he had “the utmost confidence in the safety of this aircraft,” according to video shared by an NBC News reporter who was on the flight.
Last month, the Federal Aviation Administration approved changes that Boeing
made to an automated flight-control system implicated in crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people in all. In both crashes, the system pushed the nose down repeatedly based on faulty sensor readings, and pilots were unable to regain control.
The FAA cleared the way for U.S. airlines to resume using the plane if certain changes are made and pilots are provided with additional training, including time in a flight simulator.
Brazil’s Gol airlines on
Dec. 9 operated the first passenger flight with a revamped Max. Since then, Gol and Aeromexico combined have operated about 600 flights with Max jets, according to the tracking service Flightradar24 and aviation-data firm Cirium.
American Airlines plans to make one round trip a day between Miami and New York with Max jets through Monday before putting the plane on more routes. United Airlines plans to resume Max flights in February, and
Southwest Airlines expects to follow in March.
All three airlines say they will give customers the chance to change flights if they are uncomfortable flying on the Max.
The Max was grounded worldwide in March 2019, days after the second crash. Reports by House and Senate committees faulted Boeing and the FAA for failures in the process of certifying the plane. Congressional investigators uncovered internal Boeing documents in which some company employees raised safety concerns and others bragged about deceiving regulators.
FAA Administrator Stephen Dickson, a former military and airline pilot, operated a test flight in September and vouched for the reworked plane’s safety, saying he would put his family on it. American Airlines President Robert Isom was on Tuesday’s U.S. flight, according to the airline.
CRASH VICTIMS’ KIN
Some relatives of people who died in the second crash, a Max operated by Ethiopian Airlines, contend that the plane is still unsafe. They and their lawyers say Boeing is refusing to hand over documents about the plane’s design and development.
“The truth is that 346 people are now dead because Boeing cut corners, lied to regulators, and simply considers this the cost of doing business,” Yalena Lopez-Lewis, whose husband died in the crash, said in a statement issued by her lawyers. “It is infuriating that American Airlines is in effect rewarding Boeing for the corrupt and catastrophic process that led to the Max.”
Zipporah Kuria, a British citizen whose father also died in the Ethiopia crash, pointed to the recent disclosure in a Senate committee report that Boeing representatives coached FAA test pilots reviewing updates to the Max flight-control system.
“Boeing leadership is still riddled with deceit. Their priorities are not on consumer safety,” she said in an interview.
Boeing spokesman Bernard Choi said the company “learned many hard lessons” from the crashes and is committed to safety.
“We continue to work closely with global regulators and our customers to support the safe return of the fleet to service around the world,” Choi said.
The Max is a workhorse of the global airline fleet, used for domestic flights and some shorter international ones. It is significantly more fuel efficient than its predecessors and, as a smaller, single-aisle plane, is the kind of aircraft that airlines have favored in recent years to serve growing demand for direct, nonstop flights.
The return of the plane to U.S. skies is a huge boost for Boeing, which has lost billions of dollars during the Max grounding because it has been unable to deliver new planes to airline customers.
Orders for the plane plunged after the grounding. Boeing has removed more than 1,000 Max jets from its backlog because airlines canceled orders or the sales are not certain to go through as the pandemic’s effects grip the travel industry.
Boeing has scored some new orders for the Max in recent weeks. Ryanair, the lowcost European airline, agreed to buy 75 Max jets, and Alaska Airlines expanded an order by nearly two dozen planes.
But the plane’s reintroduction is likely to be slowed as airlines struggle with the deep and sustained drop in demand for flights during the coronavirus pandemic. In the United States, airlines are generally carrying less than half as many passengers as they did a year earlier.