American Airlines Flight 718, the first commercial Boeing 737 MAX flight in the United States since regulators withdrew from the ground for 20 months in November, takes off from Miami, Florida, on December 29, 2020.
Marco Bello | Reuters
The Boeing 737 Max may return to Canadian airspace as of Wednesday, officials said, concluding nearly two years of government review after the plane was involved in two fatal crashes that caused the planes they would land all over the world.
Transport Canada said Monday it will allow planes to be flown as long as they meet the conditions specified by Transport Canada in December, including allowing pilots to disable a faulty warning system that was found to be the center of two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019.
“Canadians and the airline industry can be confident that Transport Canada has diligently addressed all safety issues before allowing this aircraft to return to service in Canadian airspace,” said Transport Minister Omar Alghabra, in a statement.
The measures go beyond those announced by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in November, which forced Boeing to make changes to the aircraft’s computer systems and forced pilots to train in flight simulators. flight.
The planes have been landed since March 2019 following the crashes of a Lion Air flight near Jakarta on October 29, 2018 and an Ethiopian Airlines flight on March 10, 2019, and killed one total of 346 people. The researchers determined that the cause of the crashes was a faulty computer system that pushed the plane’s nose down during the flight and could not be overridden by the pilots.
Boeing admitted in court records that two of its pilot technical experts tricked the U.S. FAA into a flight control system called the Maneuvering Feature System (MCS), which could point its nose down if the sensors indicated that the plane could be in danger. aerodynamic stop: that it can fall from the sky.
The system was not part of the previous 737 models. MCAS was added because the larger engines of the Max, which are mounted higher and later on the low-sweep wings of the 737, gave the aircraft a tendency to tilt too high up in some conditions.
Boeing downplayed MCAS and did not mention it in aircraft manuals. Most pilots didn’t know it.