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"For the first time in a year and a half I can say there's an
end in sight to work on the MAX," said Patrick Ky, executive
director of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).
EASA expects to lift its technical ban "not long" after the U.S.
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), probably in November, but
national operational clearances needed for individual airlines
to resume flying in Europe could take longer, he said.
"We are looking at November," he said when asked when the
technical ban would be lifted. China is expected to take longer
to give its own approval, he said, without elaborating.
Cologne-based EASA, which regulates air safety in 32 mainly
European Union countries, has locked horns with the FAA and
Boeing over the scope of an international review into 737 MAX
systems following two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019.
All but one of the differences has been resolved, he said, with
EASA, supported by some unions, calling for pilots to be able to
manually cut power to a "stick shaker" alarm system suspected of
distracting Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crew.
The main focus of the review has surrounded black-box evidence
that bad data from a single faulty flight-angle sensor triggered
a cockpit software system that repeatedly pointed the aircraft's
nose down and overwhelmed the crew on both flights.
Boeing has said inputs from both "angle of attack" sensors on
the MAX will be used in the modified aircraft, instead of just
one in the past, but EASA has called for a third "synthetic"
sensor to provide independently computed data.
Ky said Boeing had agreed to install the computerised
third-sensor system on the next version of the plane, the
230-seat 737 MAX 10, followed by retrofits on the rest of the
fleet later.
Turning to Boeing's next development, Ky said EASA would examine
the 400-seat 777X development "much more closely" than it would
have done if the MAX grounding had not happened and pay
particularly close attention to flight control systems.
(Reporting by Laurence Frost, Tim Hepher; editing by Toby Chopra
and Jason Neely)
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