SEATTLE — The Federal Aviation Administration confirms regulators from nine countries are meeting at a FAA facility in the Seattle area this week to look at Boeing's 737 MAX's automated flight control system and how to improve the certification of jets in the future.
The US House aviation subcommittee also announced it will hold hearings in Washington, D.C. on May 15 on the status of Boeing 737 MAX.
May promises to only get busier as a final flight of the 737 MAX 7 test aircraft with FAA pilots at the controls will evaluate the modifications Boeing made to the software governing the MCAS flight control feature. The MCAS system has been implicated in two crashes of brand new MAX jets at the cost of 346 lives.
In both those crashes, the first in Indonesia on October 29th, and a second in Ethiopia on March 10th, MCAS deployed in a way which forced the nose of the plane down as pilots fought for control. Bad sensor data coming from a single angle of attack sensor on each jet is implicated in both of the crashes.
A final cause in both crashes has not been reached, Boeing saying MCAS was but one link in a chain of events.
Boeing also defends its decision to rely on one sensor during the initial design of MCAS, what's called a single point of failure, something avoided in aircraft designs. The company decided to rely on one sensor even though the aircraft has two. That is now changing.
The update to the software controlling MCAS will now rely on both angle of attack sensors, limit MCAS's ability to change the trajectory of the flight and only activate once rather than repeatedly.
The review of the MCAS software won't approve or disapprove of the fix. Instead it will look at how it was certified. FAA will also have a "candid discussion" to improve future certification processes.
All Boeing 737 MAX jets were grounded globally within three days of the second Ethiopian crash. That grounding is still in force, as Boeing confirms it has raised its credit line by $1.5 billion to deal with costs related to the grounding and its attempts to return the MAX to flight.