The Boeing 737 Max received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to reenter commercial service on Wednesday morning, after being grounded for 20 months following two fatal crashes.
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| American Airlines is currently the only airline that said it will fly the Boeing 737 Max in 2020. |
This approval marks the end to one of the longest aircraft groundings in history. After U.S. regulators were forced to ground the plane in 2018 when two crashes killed 346 within the same year.
In October 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 was 13 minutes into its flight when it crashed into the Java Sea off the coast of Indonesia. Not even five months later, Ethiopian Air Lines Flight 302 crashed near Addis Ababa airport six minutes after takeoff, killing everyone on board.
An automated flight control system misfired on both occasions, leaving the pilots struggling to regain control over the aircraft and its altitude. This program was not mentioned in the pilot manual because the aircraft was marketed as an airliner that would require very little pilot retraining.
In response, Boeing decided to rewrite the entire flight computer software.
While Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said he believes the Max is "safer than the safest airplane flying today", the challenge facing Boeing now will be rebuilding the public's trust of the aircraft amid allegations that profit was put over safety, the regulation process was broken and Boeing's culture of concealment allowed this fatal flaw to be approved.
American Airlines pilot Capt. Dennis Tajer has been flying commercial planes for more than 30 years, and he told ABC News:
"I'm not walking down that jet bridge, and nor is any other pilot until we've been assured that this airplane will be fixed, it is fully vetted, it is transparent and we are robustly trained," Tajer, who is also a spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association. "We have yet to see the full training on it."
To understand what went wrong, you need to examine hardware that lead to the aircraft's faulty software:
The Boeing 737 Max was developed and marketed as an alternative to rival Airbus's updated A320neo, which included a "new geared turbo-fan engine" that would make the plane 15% more fuel efficient.
Boeing also wanted to upgrade its popular narrow-body aircraft with the more advanced engines and match the A320neo's marketing that pilots will require minimal training.
However, unlike the A320, Boeing's aircraft was too short to simply mount the larger engines under the wing. Instead, the company mounted the engines slightly higher on the wing, so the top of the engine sat slightly above the wing.
This caused the aircraft to pitched too high when the aircraft was at full-throttle, and threatened a stall, so Boeing installed a correction software that lowered the nose automatically if the plane was flown at too high of an angle.
This system was not mentioned in the two-hour iPad training course created for pilots by Boeing, in keeping with their promise that the plane flew just like its predecessor and required little training for pilots to upgrade.
It's this software that became the focus of the Lion Air crash investigation, and ultimately lead to the Ethiopian Air Lines plane crash as well.
Although the aircraft has been officially ungrounded, the soonest the Max can legally fly with paying passengers is December.
Airlines will need to training their pilots to be ready and confident to fly these planes before any passengers board. This process that could take months.
So far, American Airlines is the only company to announce it will fly the Max in 2020.
