Boeing’s 737 MAX faces key hurdle at European safety meeting

At Gatwick Airport just outside London on Monday, air safety regulators began meeting to decide what must be done to let Boeing's 737 MAX return to the skies.

Reporter Carolyn Adolph talked to KUOW’s Angela King about issues that are still unresolved.

King: Tell us about this meeting. Who is going to be there?

Adolph: Well, it's a nine-day conference, and it marks the start of the homestretch for Boeing. Brazil's going to be there, so will Canada, which was the first to conduct test flights on the modified MAX. Canada hosted the European aviation agency last week for test flights in Vancouver. And now the Europeans are coming to Gatwick, and of course the Federal Aviation Administration will be there.

They'll be in London, because those test flights went OK. And now they're ready for the next stage of re-certifying the plane to fly.

Why do these agencies from outside the U.S. have a role in determining whether the MAX can fly again?

Well, normally all of these agencies would have deferred to the FAA. They expect the U.S. aviation safety agency to watch out for safety problems on any plane that's produced and designed in the U.S. But the scandal over the MAX stretched even to the FAA. You'll remember the public learned that the regulator relied very heavily on Boeing insiders to tell them the plane was safe. So after the two crashes, trust in the FAA was about as damaged as trust in Boeing.

And these foreign agencies said that they’re going to make their own verifications and they have new importance because they are the independent overseers. They owe it to the fliers they're protecting, to make sure that Boeing gets it right this time. The FAA is also fighting to regain its reputation. And the head of the agency, Steve Dixon, has said from the beginning that he's going to fly the plane himself before the agency lifts the grounding. And now that flights actually part of the official plan.

So now that the agencies seem satisfied with the test flights, what is next?

Now they have to review Boeing's training plan for pilots who will fly the MAX. In the past, if a pilot has flown one 737, they've flown them all. And early on, Boeing maintained that that would be true for the MAX as well. They said no one needed special training or time in a simulator. Fast forward a year and a half, and Boeing is saying a simulator sounds like a good idea. And now this meeting at Gatwick will help decide what needs to happen inside that simulator and what else is needed.

And pilots are being involved in the discussion. They’ve complained that Boeing and kept them in the dark about the way that the MAX worked. And now the Allied Pilots Association says it got a 200-page packet from Boeing full of information about the MAX’s systems, including new procedure checklists, and they will also be at the table in Gatwick.

When will the MAX be cleared finally?

So if I answered that question, at this point would anybody believe it? Journalists have been reporting the ungrounding of the MAX for more than a year. There's a rumor that says it's imminent. As the FAA has said from the start, it happens when it happens.