US not rushing Boeing 737 Max back to flight: FAA chief

Bloomberg

US aviation regulators won’t be rushed and have no timeline on when to return Boeing Co’s grounded 737 Max jet to flight, an official said as the government prepares to hold discussions with dozens of other nations on the plane’s fate.
Federal Aviation Administration acting chief Daniel Elwell said the agency’s technical
experts will leave “no stone unturned” as they examine a remedy Boeing is proposing to fix a malfunction linked to two fatal crashes since October.
“If it takes a year to find everything we need to give us the confidence to lift the order, then so be it,” Elwell said to reporters, a day before a meeting with global regulators was set to begin.
The stakes for the gathering in Texas are enormous for Boeing and the FAA. The aircraft manufacturer’s top-selling family of jetliners faces a grounding that could extend for months, while the FAA’s reputation as the leading arbiter of aviation safety is being tested.
A total of 57 delegates from 31 individual countries as well as the European Aviation Safety Agency and the United Nations International Civil Aviation Organization attended the meetings in Fort Worth, Texas.
“If there is a crisis in confidence, we hope this will help to show the world that the world still talks together about aviation safety issues,” Elwell said.
While Boeing hasn’t presented its final proposed software fix and the accompanying changes to training to the FAA, the agency will share with other nations the framework for the safety analysis it will use to evaluate the proposals, Elwell said.
Boeing was close to sending a proposed fix to the FAA almost two months ago, but backed off at the last moment when an outside review panel raised concerns, he said. A so-called non-advocate review at the planemaker raised issues with the work that had been completed so far, Elwell said.
The attendees are facing contradictory demands to be both tough on the FAA and Boeing in the name of safety, while at the same time finding a way to get the 737 Max plane back into the air for economic reasons, said one person familiar with what the representatives are thinking.
FAA must demonstrate it is being extremely thorough in its technical evaluation of Boeing’s proposed fixes to the plane while at the same time showing sensitivity to the political pressures the other countries face at home in the wake of the two high-profile crashes, said a second person who has dealt with such discussions in the past.
Among the FAA’s challenges will be how swiftly other aviation agencies adopt its conclusions about the plane’s possible return to flight.
Agencies around the world in recent years have signed numerous bilateral agreements that allow them to accept each other’s work certifying aircraft, though those agreements allow for exceptions.
The FAA grounded 737 Max models after evidence emerged that a crash three days earlier of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that had just taken off from Addis Ababa had involved an erroneous activation of a device that commanded the plane to dive.