Boeing 737 Max scandal: news and updates

This September, the Boeing 737 Max — the airliner involved in two fatal crashes within five months that killed 346 people — will take to the skies for American Airlines once again after nearly six months of international grounding.

Reintroducing the 737 Max to American Airlines’ service will add 754 flights per week on 31 routes, overwhelmingly centered on Miami, according to the travel industry outlet the Points Guy. That means almost 131,000 new seats will soon be available to travelers.

A gray-haired pilot straight out of central casting landed a US Airways airliner on the Hudson River on January 15, 2009. Geese had badly damaged the plane’s engines, and faced with an airplane that was little more than a glider, the pilot successfully landed the Airbus 320 in the water. All 155 people aboard survived.

You probably know the pilot by name: Celebrity is fleeting to most, but even a decade later, Captain Sully is widely remembered for his heroic landing, now known as the Miracle on the Hudson. The story even inspired a 2016 Clint Eastwood film starring Tom Hanks.

President Donald Trump has some advice for Boeing on its 737 Max jets: rebrand.

Trump on Monday morning fired off a tweet directed at Boeing, which has come under international scrutiny in the wake of two deadly crashes of its 737 Max 8 jets in a matter of months. The planes have since been grounded worldwide.

In the past six months, two airplanes have fallen out of the air and crashed shortly after takeoff. Both flights were operating the same plane: the Boeing 737 Max 8.

In October, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed in Indonesia, killing 189 people. And last month, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed in Bishoftu, Ethiopia, killing 157 people.

On Thursday, Boeing for the first time officially took responsibility for the two crashes of 737 Max jets that got the planes grounded by regulators.

Claiming responsibility was part of an attempt to get the planes approved to fly again. Boeing was trying to say that it now understands why the planes crashes — flawed software — and has a plan in place to replace it with new software that will eliminate the problem and persuade regulators to get the planes off the ground. But then Friday morning, the company announced that it had found a second, unrelated software flaw that it also needs to fix and will somewhat delay the process of getting the planes cleared to fly again.

Boeing executives are offering a simple explanation for why the company’s best-selling plane in the world, the 737 Max 8, crashed twice in the past several months, leaving Jakarta, Indonesia, in October and then Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in March. Executives claimed on March 27 that the cause was a software problem — and that a new software upgrade fixes it.

But this open-and-shut version of events conflicts with what diligent reporters in the aviation press have uncovered in the weeks since Asia, Europe, Canada, and then the United States grounded the planes.

Boeing is in the middle of a public relations nightmare. The world’s largest commercial aircraft manufacturer is being investigated by the Department of Justice in response to two deadly crashes involving its 737 Max jets less than six months apart. Shortly after the second crash, which occurred on March 10 and involved an Ethiopian Airlines jet headed from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya, regulators in China, the European Union, and the US grounded all Boeing 737 Max jets. The initial panic over the safety of Boeing’s jets has died down, but the investigations into what went wrong on the Ethiopian Airlines flight and the deadly Lion Air crash five months earlier are ongoing — and Boeing remains in damage control mode.

On Monday, the CEO of Ethiopian Airlines said it would be difficult for Boeing to restore his trust in the safety of its planes. Though it’s still unclear what caused the deadly accidents, it’s undoubtable that the manufacturer’s reputation — and its stock — has taken a hit. But Boeing isn’t the first big company to struggle with a scandal of a similar scale; companies like Chipotle and Toyota have faced enormous safety concerns as well. The question isn’t if Boeing will be able to bounce back, but how long it will take — and how much it will cost — for its reputation to recover.

In a hurry to finish design and manufacture of the Boeing 737 MAX, the new plane that has crashed twice in the past six months, and get the plane to the runway, both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration appear to have rushed and cut corners — including not mentioning to pilots they had installed a new flight control system on the updated aircraft.

The result, according to a lengthy and damning Seattle Times investigation, was that the company’s safety analysis understated how much control the system could exert in flight and failed to account for how a pilot’s actions might influence the system’s behavior. After the first crash, the FAA learned the plane’s flight control system could adjust the plane’s horizontal tail, pushing down the plane’s nose, to a much greater degree than the initial documents stated.

The second deadly crash of a Boeing 737 Max model airplane within months of the first has put flyers around the world on edge. Multiple countries have grounded the planes as a result, including, after coming under pressure, the United States.

Here’s what happened: On Sunday, March 10, Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Nairobi, Kenya, faltered and crashed soon after taking off, killing all 157 people on board. The incident was, of course, devastating. But making it even more disturbing is that it happened just months after a Lion Air flight taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia, crashed in October, killing all 189 passengers.