Death Machine 737 MAX jet could soon fly?????

Boeing’s 737 MAX jet could soon fly again despite damning probes

By BRIANNA GURCIULLO and SAM MINTZ

Boeing’s grounded 737 MAX could be cleared to return to the skies in the U.S. as early as this year, despite a continued cascade of damning revelations about the design and approval of the passenger jet that crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia, killing a total of 346 people.

If the MAX flies again soon, it will be a major test of the international credibility of U.S. aviation regulators, who risk finding themselves out of step with the rest of the world if authorities in Europe and elsewhere continue to prohibit the aircraft from flying in their airspace.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s evaluation process for returning the MAX to service is moving along even as the agency and Boeing continue to face questions about how the plane gained regulatory approval in 2017. Indonesia’s government issued a report Friday faulting oversight by both the company and the agency, a week after congressional investigators released 2016 emails and text messages in which a former Boeing pilot had boasted of playing "jedi-mind" tricks on regulators.

This week represents a crucial test for the future of Boeing, whose CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, will testify before Congress in what promises to be two days of brutal questions about the twin disasters.

Restoring the trust of the flying public may be an even harder task.

“The recertification of the aircraft is one thing, but the recertification of the trust and confidence is another,” said Dennis Tajer, a spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association, which represents pilots at American Airlines. “You can have an airplane out there flying, but unless it has the pilots standing behind it or passengers — it can fly all day long, if it’s not flying with people on it, it’s really not a product.”

Even so, Boeing said last week that it had completed a “dry-run” of a certification test flight for the MAX. The FAA has repeatedly said that the process for returning it to flight will take as long as required, but U.S. airlines that operate the plane are planning for a return to service early next year.

FAA chief Steve Dickson — who days earlier had reprimanded Boeing for failing to show his agency the pilot messages — said last week that the company had hit several milestones, including handing over a key technical document. But he cautioned that testing and the consideration of training requirements would take “several more weeks.”

European regulators, meanwhile, have signaled that they won't necessarily follow the FAA's timeline. Instead they are relying on their own process, which includes testing and oversight independent of the FAA that will determine their timeline for allowing the MAX back in their airspace. Acknowledging this reality, Muilenburg has said a "phased" global return to service is possible.

Jeff Guzzetti, a consultant who previously worked at the FAA, said the combination of the Boeing pilot’s messages and emails, the reports that have been released about the MAX and the congressional hearings “may cause people to choose not to fly on a 737 MAX for a while,” but that is “different than delaying the ungrounding.”

Still, Guzzetti said he expects that Boeing will be “pilloried” at this week’s hearings.

“And they deserve it. Those emails were pretty unprofessional,” Guzzetti said.

In a 2016 email, Boeing 737 chief technical pilot Mark Forkner told someone at the FAA that he was “jedi-mind tricking regulators into accepting the training that I got accepted by the FAA.”

In a separate chain of instant messages with a Boeing coworker, also in 2016, Forkner wrote that an automated flight control feature called MCAS was “running rampant in the sim" activating when it shouldn't. He also said that he had "unknowingly" lied to regulators, though it's unclear about exactly what.

The messages and emails together again focused intense attention from media outlets and regulators on Boeing and the way the plane was certified, and led the two Democratic lawmakers in the House in charge of overseeing aviation — Reps. Peter DeFazio of Oregon and Rick Larsen of Washington — to state in the strongest terms yet that legislation to address the agency's flaws in aircraft certification is coming.

"None of this looks good. None of it looks good for Boeing right now and none of it looks good frankly for the existing process we have that is supposed to have the FAA and the [Original Equipment Manufacturer], in this case Boeing, talking to each other," Larsen said in an interview with POLITICO. "I don't see how the current certification laws stand."

On Friday, after Indonesian accident investigators released a report blaming the crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX on failures at virtually every level — with the FAA, with Boeing, with the plane's pilots, with the airline's maintenance — DeFazio issued a statement saying it's "clear that reforms will be needed to ensure that future safety-critical systems don’t create single points of failure that bring down new commercial aircraft designs."

"I will continue to use every tool at my disposal to get to the bottom of the failures in the system that led to not one, but two tragic crashes," DeFazio said. "And I will be introducing legislation at the appropriate time to ensure that unairworthy commercial airliners no longer slip through our regulatory system."

DeFazio chairs one of the committees that Muilenburg will appear before next week. The Boeing CEO is sure to be grilled about a series of reports from crash investigators and international experts that found problems with Boeing's design assumptions, the FAA's certification process and the company's communication with the FAA throughout.

But Guzzetti, the consultant, argued that the Lion Air report could actually “provide some relief to Boeing,” since it points to maintenance problems and pilot shortcomings in addition to design issues.

“I think it’s going to mitigate some of the blame that Boeing is going to get,” Guzzetti said.