Boeing’s crisis jet 737 Max should soon be able to take off again in Europe after being banned from flying for almost two years. He expects the re-approval in the next week, said the head of the European aviation authority EASA, Patrick Ky, on Tuesday in an online event of the German aviation press club. According to the authority, the improvements to the aircraft type met the requirements for flight safety. Until the restart of the 737 Max in Europe, there are still pilot training courses on the agenda.

In Boeing’s home country USA and in Brazil the 737 Max is already registered again. In Canada, the take-off ban for the aircraft type will be lifted this Wednesday, as the local aviation authority Transport Canada announced on Monday. The airline Air Canada then announced that it would be using the aircraft again from February 1st.

Major customer Ryanair Also that of the low-cost airline Ryanair ordered special type Max 200 – a Boeing 737 Max 8 with special cabin equipment for more passengers – will be approved in the coming weeks and will be ready for the summer, said EASA boss Ky. With over 200 orders, Ryanair is one of the world’s largest buyers of the 737 Max. Only in December did the airline order further 20 copies. In Europe, Norwegian and TUIfly, among others, have several aircraft of this type in their fleet.

The Boeing 737 Max was in March 2019 after two crashes with a total of 346 dead. The faulty control program MCAS was considered to be the main cause of the accidents. Boeing actually wanted to fix the problems after the first crash. However, other deficiencies repeatedly occurred, so that it ultimately took around 20 months before the US aviation authority FAA issued a flight ban for the USA Picked up in mid-November.

“Fly safely” According to Ky, EASA has also carried out its own tests, which they at the original FAA approval. There was full transparency of the FAA and the manufacturer Boeing after the accidents, said Ky. According to him, the European authority has tested the jet without the controversial MCAS software. The 737 Max would be “an airplane that can be safely flown even without MCAS,” he said.

Im In the case of the two crashes, incorrect data from a sensor for the aircraft’s angle of attack had led the software to assume a flight attitude that was too steep and counter-steered by trimming the tail unit at the tail. Because the crew was not prepared for this and the functionality of the system was not known, possible countermeasures were not taken and the aircraft crashed.

More redundancy MCAS now receives data from two physical sensors that are compared with each other. In addition, the pilots are trained to recognize a malfunction due to incorrect sensor data, said Ky.

EASA had also requested that the system receive a third, independent data source. For this purpose, a “synthetic” flight attitude determination is to be retrofitted, which is already used, for example, in the Boeing large-capacity jet 787, for which 737 Max but has yet to be developed. This is software that uses various data to calculate plausible values ​​for angle of attack, flow velocity and flight attitude and makes them available to the flight systems. ( With material from dpa ) /

(vbr)