American Airlines Flight 718, the first US Boeing 737 MAX commercial flight since regulators grounded for 20 months in November, will depart from Miami, Florida on December 29, 2020.
Marco Bello | Reuters
The Boeing 737 Max may return to Canadian airspace starting Wednesday, officials said, completing nearly two years of government review after the plane was involved in two fatal crashes that grounded the planes worldwide.
Transport Canada said Monday that the planes will be allowed to fly as long as they meet the conditions specified by Transport Canada in December, including allowing pilots to disable a faulty warning system that was found to be central to two fatalities. crashes in 2018 and 2019.
“Canadians and the aviation industry can trust that Transport Canada has diligently addressed all safety issues before returning this aircraft to service in Canadian airspace,” Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said in a statement.
The measures go beyond the measures announced in November by the US Federal Aviation Administration, which required Boeing to make changes to the aircraft’s computer systems and to train pilots in flight simulators.
The planes have been grounded since March 2019 after the crash of a Lion Air flight near Jakarta on October 29, 2018 and an Ethiopian Airlines flight on March 10, 2019, which killed a total of 346 people. Investigators determined that the cause of the crashes was a faulty computer system that pushed the aircraft’s nose down during flight and could not be suppressed by pilots.
Boeing admitted in lawsuits that two of its engineering pilots experts cheated on the U.S. FAA about a flight control system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, that could point an aircraft’s nose down if sensors indicated the aircraft might be in danger . aerodynamic stable – that it could fall from the sky.
The system was not part of previous 737 models. MCAS was added because the Max’s larger engines, mounted higher and further forward on the 737’s low-flared wings, tended to tip the plane too far with the nose up under certain conditions.
Boeing downplayed the significance of MCAS and did not mention it in aircraft manuals. Most pilots knew nothing about it.