MAX - Fremtidige sertifiseringsregimer vil endres - Curt Lewis

Boeing expects changes to safety regime after 737 crisis

• Aircraft maker's lead independent director defends CEO as pressure builds on regulators

• The US Congress will conduct hearings in to the Boeing 737 Max crisis next week. The aircraft remain grounded around the world

Boeing is expecting "far reaching" changes to the way aircraft are certified safe across the global aviation industry, according to its lead director, as pressure builds on regulators to prevent further fatal accidents like the two recent Boeing 737 Max air disasters.

David Calhoun, who is lead independent director on the board of the world's largest commercial aircraft maker, defended the role chief executive Dennis Muilenburg has played in the crisis provoked by the two crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, in which 346 people died. All Boeing 737 Max aircraft have been grounded until Boeing and regulators agree on a fix to a flight control system believed to have played a big role in both crashes.

"I think our leader has done a really good job in keeping the company focused on delivering a fix to our part of this issue, and also to begin planning for long-term changes which I think are going to be quite far reaching and not just for Boeing but for the industry at large," he told the Financial Times in an interview.

"I am confident that substantive things will happen. Nobody's ducking anything. I think this will be a very long set of improvements over a long period of time", he added, but declined to go into detail.

Mr Calhoun defended Mr Muilenburg's decision to advise the US regulator not to ground the jets until after most global regulators had done so. "So far he has passed all the tests," he said.

His comments came as signs of a deepening rift emerged between US and European regulators over who should be in charge of ensuring the safety of the Max before it returns to global skies.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said it was conducting its own "independent" review of the design of the Max and that the completion of this was "a prerequisite to the return to service of the aircraft" in Europe.

I am confident that substantive things will happen. Nobody's ducking anything. I think this will be a very long set of improvements over a long period of time

David Calhoun, lead independent director at Boeing
Aviation experts said it was not unprecedented for EASA to conduct its own review, but it was unusual. The normal convention is for regulators to follow the lead of the authority in the country where the aeroplane was manufactured, in this case that of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The FAA, which had been seen as the leader on aviation safety prior to the two accidents, has come under fire both for the way in which it certified the aircraft and for being the last big regulator to ground the plane.

News of the rift comes ahead of congressional hearings in Washington this week into the Max crisis and before the FAA convenes a critical May 23 meeting with other global regulators, which Boeing hopes will lay out a path to allow the Max to return to the skies.

"It is not unexpected and national regulators always have the ability to do their own additional checks but it certainly has not happened very often," said one industry expert.

Southwest Airlines and some US pilots unions said at the weekend that they had received federal grand jury subpoenas for documents relating to the Max, as part of an investigation by the US Department of Justice into the development of the Max and its certification as safe.

Mr Calhoun said Boeing's future would depend on restoring the trust of the flying community in the safety of its planes, but added that there is "no advertising campaign that we could organise that would mean a hill of beans" to reassuring passengers. "We have to do what we do, engineer it with pride and put it in the air and make sure everything around it is safe".