Following a four-month break, Boeing has resumed production of its troubled 737 Max aircraft.
The 737 Max aircraft was grounded globally last year after two crashes five months apart had claimed the lives of 346 people in total.
The company yesterday said that it is now set to commence building the Max again, though at “a lot rate.”
It also gave an assurance that it had put a lot into consideration ahead of the restart with the implementation of “more than a dozen initiatives focused on enhancing workplace safety and product quality.”
The company in January had suspended the production of the 737 Max at Boeing’s Renton, Washington facility while the aerospace giant waited for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to complete a review of the Max’s design changes.
At the time Boeing said, “Safely returning the 737 Max to service is our top priority.
“We know that the process of approving the 737 Max’s return to service, and of determining appropriate training requirements, must be extraordinarily thorough and robust, to ensure that our regulators, customers, and the flying public have confidence in the 737 Max updates.”
The company said it had fixed the fault with the flight control system that caused the crashes, but several other issues with the Max have since surfaced.
The new update from the company indicates that it has strong backing from the airline industry. One of the reasons it suspended production at the start of the year was because it was running out of storage space for the 400 Max planes it had already built, but which can’t be flown to customers. With that in mind, its decision to build new Max jets at a slower pace than usual makes sense.
Aside from trying to fix Max’s reputation, the slump in commercial passenger flights due to the coronavirus pandemic is causing serious difficulties for Boeing and other plane makers as carriers around the world cancel aircraft orders.
More than 100 orders of the Max alone have been canceled to date. The dire situation has forced the aerospace giant to cut its workforce by 10%, equal to around 16,000 jobs.
For now, it not clear when the Max will fly again though the company revealed it was looking at mid-2020, with the pandemic causing severe disruption, and the FAA yet to give the jet the green light, the idea of the Max flying again in the next month or two appears somewhat remote.
