Grounded Boeing 737 Max planes. SOURCE: Google
Boeing has said it expects to resume deliveries of its grounded 737 Max planes as early as next month and that airline could be able to restart commercial service in January, sending shares of the manufacturer sharply higher.
Boeing’s 737 Max planes have been grounded since mid-March after two
fatal crashes killed 346 people. Investors cheered the new timeline,
which indicated the company is at the tail end of the process of winning
regulators’ approval for Boeing’s bestselling planes, even though it
was later than the company’s previous estimates and repeated delays have
prompted airlines to remove the planes from their schedules several
times.
Southwest Airlines and American Airlines on Friday pulled the planes
from their schedules until early March, nearly a year since regulators’
grounding orders. Shares of Boeing were up more than four percent in
afternoon trading, adding 110 points to the Dow Jones Industrial
Average.
The company halted deliveries of the planes after the global ban
earlier this year and slashed production by 20 percent to 42 a
month. Boeing has scrambled to gain regulators’ approval for software fixes it has developed for the jetliners after a flight-control program was implicated in both crashes — one in Indonesia in October 2018 and another in Ethiopia in March. Pilots in both crashes were battling the system, known as MCAS, which was activated due to erroneous data from a
single sensor.
Boeing has changed the system to include data from two sensors.
Lawmakers slammed Boeing CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, in two hearings on
Capitol Hill late last month over the plane’s design. Muilenburg admitted the company made mistakes.
The company has completed a test of the software with the Federal
Aviation Administration in a simulator, the company said in an update
Monday. But the process isn’t complete. Boeing also has to bring airline pilots into 737 simulators to assess how cockpit alerts and other factors affect pilot workload. The National Transportation Safety Board criticized Boeing in a report in September for underestimating the impact of such alerts on pilot performance.
Boeing needs to conduct a certification flight with officials and regulators also still have to sign off on new pilot training, which the company expects to have in January. The grounding has crimped the growth of 737 Max airline customers and cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue after they were forced to cancel flights. Even after the planes are fully cleared to fly, airlines will have to train thousands of their 737 pilots before they can operate commercially. That process can take more than a month.
