MAX - Tydeligere avstand mellom FAA og EASA - Oppdatering - Curt Lewis

European regulator plans its own test flights of Boeing 737 MAX in sign of rift with FAA Boeing has stored 100 of its undelivered 737 MAX airplanes at the Moses Lake airport while it awaits clearance from the FAA  Europe's aviation regulator will send its own test pilots and engineers to fly forthcoming certification flight tests of Boeing's newly modified 737 MAX, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said Tuesday. In addition, EASA said it favors a design that takes readings from three independent Angle of Attack sensors rather than the two-sensor system in Boeing's proposed upgrade to the MAX. The European agency's stance underscores how badly the two deadly MAX crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia have disrupted the harmony in international aviation that previously granted primacy to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In little-noted comments at the European Parliament last week, the French executive director of EASA, Patrick Ky, had pointed words for his American counterparts. "The FAA is in a very difficult situation," said Ky in a video of his address to the Transport committee of the European Parliament. "When they will say, this (airplane) is good to go, it's very likely that international authorities will want a second opinion, or a third opinion." "That was not the case one year ago," Ky added. "I think that's going to be a very strong change in the overall worldwide hierarchy or relationship between the different authorities." Although EASA said it's not mandating how Boeing must address its concern over the Angle of Attack system redesign, Tuesday's declaration that it would prefer a three-sensor system was a more specific critique than that laid out in Ky's slide presentation last week, which said Boeing had "still no appropriate response to Angle of Attack integrity issues." Installation of a third Angle of Attack sensor in the MAX could be an expensive and prolonged process and might affect not only the new 737 MAX jet but the thousands of older model 737s in service around the world, which all come with just two such sensors. Boeing declined to comment. EASA's elaboration Tuesday of its differences with the FAA is a further sign of the differences that have emerged since the October and March crashes that killed 346 people and caused the plane to be grounded worldwide. According to insiders, the FAA is all but set to approve Boeing's proposed MAX redesign. An FAA spokesman, citing the example of several Airbus jets, said, "It's common for aviation authorities to conduct test flights of new aircraft and major derivatives that other civil aviation authorities certificate." The spokesman added: "We continue to work with other international aviation safety regulators and will carefully consider all recommendations. The FAA will incorporate any changes that would improve our certification activities." For Boeing, any daylight between the various regulators could be a massive problem. As it moves closer to finalizing its proposed fix for the 737 MAX, it's struggling with the deep divergence between the FAA and corresponding air safety regulators overseas, most critically EASA. Ky told the European committee his agency's insistence on conducting a broad new independent review of the design of all the safety-critical systems on the MAX was "not very popular with our American colleagues." But he said such a new review was necessary because there were parts of the original MAX design that EASA "had not completely certified ourselves, because we had delegated some of the tasks to the FAA." As a result, he said EASA decided "to basically re-certify the parts that are safety critical that we hadn't looked at in the previous instance." He said this included but was not confined to the new flight-control system - called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) - that was triggered in both crashes by a faulty Angle of Attack signal and repeatedly pushed down the nose of each jet until the pilots lost control. Ky said an imminent report from an international panel of aviation-safety experts set up by the FAA to review the certification of the MAX - and representing 11 separate regulators including EASA and its Canadian and Chinese counterparts - will cast "a critical eye on this notion of delegation from the FAA to Boeing." This Joint Authority Technical Review (JATR) report is expected any day now, and Ky said it will have a particular focus on the system safety assessment "of this famous MCAS, which was a major, if not the major, contributor to both accidents ... which had been auto-certified by Boeing." "Yes, there was a problem in this notion of delegation by the FAA of the MCAS safety assessment to Boeing," Ky told the EU Parliament committee. "This would not happen in our system," he insisted. "Everything which is safety-critical, everything which is innovative ... has to be seen by us and not delegated."

Boeing CEO: Global aviation regulators may not clear 737 Max to fly at the same time Boeing's CEO says he still expects the 737 Max planes to return to service in the fourth quarter of 2019. Dennis Muilenburg acknowledged that regulators may not all agree when to allow the planes to fly again. Boeing's 737 Max has been grounded since mid-March after two fatal crashes. The Boeing 737 Max, grounded for the last six months after two fatal crashes, might not return to service in every country on the same timeline, depending on when global regulators deem the plane airworthy, CEO Dennis Muilenburg said Wednesday. The manufacturer has developed a software fix for the jets, its best-selling plane, but hasn't yet submitted it to regulators for approval. Muilenburg told an industry conference that Boeing still expects the planes to return to service early in the fourth quarter, but regulators across the globe may not clear it for flight at the same time. "I think the phased ungrounding of the airplane amongst regulators around the world is a possibility," he said. Boeing shares were up by about 3% in afternoon trading. Earlier this month, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration's counterpart in Europe, said questions remained about the angle-of-attack sensors on the planes, which measure the angle of the plane compared with oncoming air. Erroneous data from these sensors were implicated in both 737 Max crashes, in which a flight-control software that automatically pushes the nose of the planes downward when it senses a stall was activated. Boeing changed the flight control system, known as MCAS, to feed it data from two sensors instead of just one, as a second check to ensure the data is accurate. In a presentation for the European Parliament, EASA's executive director, Patrick Ky, said that there was "still no appropriate response to angle of attack integrity issues." "We're going to respect individual questions from different regulators," Muilenburg said. "EASA has brought up some questions that we're working our way through. I wouldn't see those as divisive." The questions don't "necessarily mean hardware changes," but that they can likely be answered with simulators and software, if needed, he added.