Boeing 737 MAX Likely Ungrounded In October, Flying Passengers In December by Gary Leff on August 31, 2020 At the end of last week American Airlines told its pilots that based on conversations with the FAA and Administrator Stephen Dickson that they “see the finish line, it’s making good progress” bringing the Boeing 737 MAX into service. Their “targeted timeframe… [is] end of October-ish for the ungrounding to occur” for the aircraft. American intends to fly passengers in commercial service with the MAX starting in the second half of December.
I am going with the "it's always safest to fly after a plane crash/travel after a terrorist attack" mentality.
Yes. I don't trust Boeing management and I also don't trust the FAA's capability to resist political pressure. Ultimately, I will fly the Max but I'm going to wait until the type does a few hundred cycles after being restored to the fleet. To be clear, I do trust Boeing engineers with my life. My problem is that politics have caused a deviation from engineering practices and processes. This is why I don't trust the solution. Engineers can fix this problem. It seems relatively straight forward, from what little I know. This seems like one of those situations where engineers may not be allowed to design a solution and the end result could easily be a termination of the Max program, before this thing is over. No engineering company should be this top-down. It's one of my concerns about Tesla but, so far, I haven't seen this behaviour at Tesla.
Boeing’s 737 MAX Returns to U.S. Commercial Service American Airlines is putting passengers back on Boeing’s 737 MAX on Tuesday for the first time in the U.S. since the aircraft was grounded nearly two years ago following two deadly crashes.