Employees of the Federal aviation administration (FAA) of the United States in November 2018 admitted that the Boeing 737 MAX liners can be dangerous in operation, but their flights were not suspended. This is stated in an article published in the electronic version of the newspaper The Wall Street Journal.
As the newspaper notes, the FAA documents were presented at a hearing held in the Committee on transport and infrastructure of the house of representatives of the US Congress. The head of the regulator Stephen Dixon addressed them.
From the materials of the FAA, it follows that in November 2018, its experts submitted a report concerning the aircraft of this model. It was prepared in connection with the crash of Lion Air’s Boeing 737 MAX 8 at the end of October 2018 in Indonesia. Then 189 people died.
Analysts of the air regulator in the report noted that the disaster Boeing 737 MAX can occur approximately every two or three years if you do not make technical improvements to one of the automatic flight control systems. The leadership of the FAA, as the newspaper notes, decided not to stop flying Boeing 737 MAX. Employees of the regulator hoped that the aircraft systems would be quickly finalized.
Dixon said at the hearing that the FAA should have made a different decision. At the time, the acting head of the regulator was Daniel Elwell. Dixon began managing the FAA in August 2019.
On March 10, 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashed in Ethiopia, killing 157 people. Boeing executives acknowledged that there had been a failure in the maneuverability improvement system on Board Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines aircraft before they crashed. After that, many countries, including Russia, the United States, and the European Union, for security reasons, suspended the operation of aircraft of this series.
