Boeing hopes to resume deliveries of its 737 Max jet to airlines in December and win regulatory approval to restart commercial service with the plane in January.
Boeing shares rose 4.5% in New York trading Monday.
The company spelled out several steps that it needs to complete before the grounded plane can carry passengers again.
Pilot training has emerged as a key issue around the plane's return -- and an area where Boeing failed when it introduced the plane in 2017. The timetable the company laid out Monday would allow it to generate cash by delivering planes even before the Federal Aviation Administration approves new training material for pilots.
Boeing said it has demonstrated changes to the plane during sessions with the FAA in a flight simulator. It still must show regulators those changes during one or more certification flights.
Boeing's expectations around the timing of the Max's return have proved too optimistic many times before. Even after the FAA approves a training regimen, airlines will need time to retrain pilots, and they plan to conduct flights -- likely with executives and reporters on board -- to demonstrate to the public that the plane is safe.
Two big U.S. customers -- Southwest and American -- say they don't expect the Max to carry passengers until early March -- a year after the plane was grounded following crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia killed 346 people.
Boeing has continued to pump out about 42 Max jets a month at its factory in the Seattle area, but it has been burning through cash because it can't deliver those planes and get paid by the airlines.
Meanwhile, another version of the 737 has raised concern with regulators. An FAA official wrote a memo last month saying that Southwest Airlines should ground 49 of its 737 Next Generation airliners because repairs were performed that don't meet legal standards. The Next Generation, commonly abbreviated as 737 NG, is a predecessor to the Max.
There is "a high likelihood of a violation of a regulation, order or standard" of the FAA, and the U.S. regulator needs to take immediate action to revoke the certification of the planes, said H. Clayton Foushee, the agency's director of the Office of Audit and Evaluation. The Oct. 24 letter was released Monday by the U.S. Senate.
The FAA wrote to Southwest days later ordering the airline to speed up inspections of the 737 NG planes, which were previously owned by foreign carriers. But it has stopped short of requiring that the planes be grounded. The agency said in a statement that a risk assessment had concluded the airline had taken appropriate measures.
The dispute within the regulator over the status of the planes comes as the Transportation Department's inspector general completes an audit of the FAA's oversight of airline maintenance and as lawmakers assess whistleblower claims that the agency hasn't been aggressive enough.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who is chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, wrote to the FAA on Oct. 30 saying he finds the situation "troubling."
Southwest Chief Executive Officer Gary Kelly told employees in a weekly message Monday that the company found that "a small number of repairs on a few of these aircraft" had been performed but not properly classified by the previous owners. In some cases, language or repair criteria were to blame, Kelly said.
"Our continuous assessments of the ongoing inspections has revealed nothing to warrant the expedited timeline," Kelly said of the FAA action, but Southwest remains on track to have them completed by the end of January.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on whether the Southwest jets meet FAA standards.
Information for this article was contributed by David Koenig of The Associated Press, and by Alan Levin and Mary Schlangenstein of Bloomberg News,
Business on 11/12/2019