The European Union Aviation Safety Agency is expected to allow the Boeing 737 Max to start flying again before the end of the year. The US Federal Aviation Administration is yet to give its go-ahead, but American Airlines has provisionally scheduled the plane’s return for December 29.
American realises passengers may be nervous. Boeing 737 Max aircraft were grounded worldwide last year after two crashes killed 346 people. To provide reassurance, American has drawn up plans for corporate customers to tour the plane and hear from experts. The airline says passengers will be able to see if they are booked on a 737 Max and will be able to change to another flight if they wish. “If a customer doesn’t want to fly on the 737 Max, they won’t have to,” American said.
The two crashes, a Lion Air flight in 2018 and an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max in 2019, were not due to pilot error. Nor did they result from carelessness, such as debris on the runway bursting a tyre and rupturing a fuel tank, as happened in the Air France Concorde crash of 2000. Instead, in the words of the US House of Representatives transport and infrastructure committee, the 737 Max disasters were “the horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing’s management, and grossly insufficient oversight by the FAA”.