Aviation regulators: No timeline on Boeing 737 Max 8 return
U.S. aviation regulators who waited longer than other countries to ground the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircrafts say their agencies alone have the sophisticated data needed to determine when the planes will be able to fly again.
In a lengthy hearing Wednesday before the Senate’s subcommittee on Aviation and Space, chaired by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, acting Federal Aviation Administrator Daniel Elwell did not provide a specific timeline for when the planes would be back in service. The FAA grounded the 737 Max jets earlier this month after high-profile accidents that killed hundreds of people in Ethiopia and Indonesia.
“The 737 Max will return to service for U.S. carriers only when the FAA’s analysis of the facts and technical data indicate that it is appropriate to do so,” Elwell said.
American Airlines, headquartered in Fort Worth, has 24 of the planes currently in its fleet, and 76 more ordered that are still expected for delivery. The company announced Sunday that it plans to cancel roughly 90 flights per day between now and the end of April.
Boeing unveiled a series of proposed fixes to the 737 Max planes on Wednesday.
Faced with angry lawmakers who want answers about why the U.S. was among the last countries to ground the planes, officials from FAA and the Department of Transportation defended the U.S. air transportation system “as the gold standard of the world,” and said the data they possess will be necessary for the U.S. and others to determine the cause of the problem.
“I can’t speak to the reasoning that the other nations took,” DOT’s Inspector General Calvin Scovel told lawmakers. “I know that in communication with those countries, and our requests for what data they might have, they did not have any data for us. In fact, there were several countries in communication with us who after grounding the aircraft asked us what data we had and what we might suggest for them for ungrounding when the time is right.”
While the U.S. “may have been the last country to ground the aircraft… the U.S. and Canada were the first countries to ground the aircraft for a cause and purpose,” added Scovel. “That’s important, because when you when you ground for a definable reason, then you have something by which to unground them when you’ve mitigated that or you’ve solved it our you’ve found that link.”
This story was originally published March 27, 2019 at 5:36 PM.