BOEING 737 MAX PROHIBITED FLIGHT

FOR AN INDEFINITE PERIOD

No crisis resolution expected for Boeing 737 MAX: World civil aviation authorities have not set a return date for ground-based aircraft since 13 March. "The only schedule is to make sure the plane is safe before flying," Dan Elwell, acting chief of the US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), told a news conference.

The 737 MAX, which has been banned since March 13, is likely to suffer a long standstill following the Ethiopian Airlines accidents on March 10 (157 dead) and Lion Air on October 29 in Indonesia (189 dead). Indeed the meeting, held Thursday, May 23 in Fort Worth (Texas), on the initiative of the US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), all the world aviation authorities has led to no date back in the air of the 737 MAX.

This uncertainty only reflects the distrust of the other regulators towards the FAA, to which they asked "many questions" and they wanted "clarifications" on the procedures.

Regulatory authorities should at best achieve a new certification in a dispersed order of the device. Elwell acknowledged that "each country would make its own decision," according to its own timetable.

Up to the setbacks of the aircraft it was a system of reciprocity that prevailed whereby the air regulators of other countries aligned themselves with the assessment of the original authority, in this case the FAA. Clearly, as soon as the FAA gave the green light, the other regulatory authorities followed suit. This time seems to be over.

The authorities of the sixty countries that participated in the meeting in Texas are all the less likely to rush that the FAA acknowledged that Boeing had still not submitted to it for evaluation the update of its anti-stall device MCAS. It is the malfunction of this device, implicated in both disasters that led to the temporary ban on the flight of the 737 MAX. The aircraft manufacturer had said last week that the patch was ready for certification

One can imagine a lifting of the ban in the United States towards the end of the summer and in "several months" elsewhere. The US airlines operating the 737 MAX - American Airlines, Southwest and United Airlines - hope to put the aircraft back into their flight programs by mid-August at the latest. But some countries, such as China in the context of the trade war between Beijing and the United States, could be very fussy.

To the reticence of the authorities are added those of the passengers and the pilots. The pilots do not seem willing to sign a blank check to the authorities and Boeing.

"Before the MAX returns to service: we need answers and transparency," responded Thursday ECA, the European Federation of pilots.




Luc T. for DayNewsWorld