American Airlines Flight 718, the first commercial Boeing 737 MAX flight in the US since regulators lifted a 20-month link in November, takes off from Miami, Florida, on December 29, 2020.
Marco Bello | Reuters
The Boeing 737 Max could return to Canadian airspace as early as Wednesday, officials said, ending nearly two years of government scrutiny after the aircraft was involved in two fatal crashes that saw planes land worldwide.
Transport Canada said Monday that the planes will be allowed to fly as long as they meet the conditions specified by Transport Canada in December, including allowing pilots to disable a faulty warning system that has been shown to be critical to two fatal accidents in 2018 and 2019.
“Canadians and the airline industry can be assured that Transport Canada has diligently addressed all safety issues before allowing this aircraft to return to service in Canadian airspace,” Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said in a statement.
The measures go beyond what was announced by the US Federal Aviation Administration in November, which asked Boeing to make changes to the inside’s aircraft systems and asked pilots to be trained in flight simulators.
The planes were grounded in March 2019 following the crash of a Lion Air flight near Jakarta on October 29, 2018 and an Ethiopian Airlines flight on March 10, 2019, killing a total of 346 people. Investigators determined that the cause of the crash was a faulty computer system that pushed the plane’s nose down in flight and could not be overtaken by pilots.
Boeing has admitted in court that two of its technical pilot experts have misled the US FAA over a flight control system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which could point the nose of an aircraft if sensors indicate that the plane could be in danger of the aerodynamic stall – that it could fall from the sky.
The system is not part of the previous 737 models. MCAS was added because Max’s larger engines, which are mounted higher and farther forward on the 737’s low-sweep wings, gave the plane a tendency to tilt too far up in some conditions.
Boeing downplayed the significance of MCAS and did not mention it in aircraft manuals. Most pilots didn’t know about it.