Boeing's path to returning its 737 Max jet to service is being held up by questions from the Federal Aviation Administration.
The U.S. regulator has asked Boeing to provide more details about "how pilots interact with the airplane controls and displays in different flight scenarios," the company said in a statement Thursday.
A spokesman for the FAA confirmed that the agency is asking about pilot interaction on the 737 Max but declined to provide more information about the review process or how long it is expected to take.
"This process will take as long as necessary to ensure the aircraft is returned to service safely," FAA spokesman Gregory Martin said.
More than two months after a deadly plane crash led to the worldwide grounding of the 737 Max, Boeing is facing mounting pressure from investors, airline customers and suppliers to get its flagship jet back into the air. Airlines are incurring millions of dollars in costs as planes sit idle.
Boeing continues to produce 42 planes a month, which it cannot sell until the jet has been cleared by regulators.
Boeing's timeline for a fix has been a moving target.
On Nov. 27, a month after the Lion Air crash and a day before the preliminary report into that crash was released, Boeing Vice President Mike Sinnett briefed American Airlines pilots in a meeting in Dallas and told them Boeing was working on "software that would significantly reduce the probability of it happening again."
According to an audio recording of the meeting that was provided by the Allied Pilots Association, the airline's pilot union, when the American pilots pressed Sinnett for faster action, he laid out a six-week timeline to develop the fix, followed by a 90-day period for the FAA to review and mandate its implementation.
"Our typical software revision process is about six months to a year. We're talking six weeks," Sinnett told the pilots. "We're talking about moving relatively quickly."
That meeting was 24 weeks ago.
CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in late April that the company had completed its final technical test flight with the updated flight-control system and was preparing for a certification flight and formal review by the FAA.
In a statement Thursday, Allied Pilots Association President Capt. Daniel Carey cited the November meeting and said, "It's six months later and who knows how long it will take to implement the new fix, and if it's even sufficient."
"Dennis [Muilenburg] and his engineers need to take full responsibility for the 346 deaths," Carey added.
"Boeing needs to stop dodging responsibility and stop blaming dead pilots for its mistakes."
In its statement Thursday, Boeing repeated its claim that its update for the 737 Max software has been completed.
Once it has addressed the FAA's questions, "Boeing will work with the FAA to schedule its certification test flight and submit final certification documentation," the company said.
Boeing said the flight controls have been tested on 360 hours of flights, up from 246 hours in late April.
Muilenburg in a statement cited "clear and steady progress" toward updating the 737 Max so that it will "be one of the safest airplanes ever to fly."
The FAA's acting administrator, Daniel Elwell, told members of Congress this week that the decisions of pilots played a role in the crashes of 737 Max jets in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
An automated anti-stall feature activated when it wasn't supposed to in the October crash in Indonesia, Elwell said.
That sent the plane's nose down repeatedly.
The pilots should have responded by turning off the motors to the part of the airplane that was forcing it downward, but they did not, Elwell said.
When the same automated feature -- known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System -- mistakenly kicked in less than five months later on the 737 Max involved in the Ethiopia crash, the pilots "didn't adhere to the emergency" directive issued by the FAA in November, Elwell said.
Information for this article was contributed by Douglas MacMillan of The Washington Post; and by Dominic Gates and Mike Baker of The Seattle Times.
A Section on 05/18/2019