Boeing promised pilots a 737 software fix last year, but they’re still waiting

Weeks after a deadly crash involving a Boeing plane last October, company officials met separately with the pilot unions at Southwest and American Airlines. The officials said they planned to update the software for their 737 Max jets, the plane involved in the disaster, by around the end of 2018. It was the last time the Southwest pilots union heard from Boeing, and months later, the carriers are still waiting for a fix. After a second 737 Max crashed, on Sunday in Ethiopia, United States regulators said the software update would be ready by April. “Boeing was going to have a software fix in the next five to six weeks,” said Michael Michaelis, the top safety official at the American Airlines pilots union and a Boeing 737 captain. “We told them, ‘Yeah, it can’t drag out.’ And well, here we are.” This delay is now part of the intense scrutiny over Boeing’s response after the first air disaster, a Lion Air accident that killed 189 people in Indonesia. The second crash, involving an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed 157 people, bore similarities to the first, pointing to potential problems with the automated system that requires the update. The planned fix was “designed to detect the problem,” said Jon Weaks, the president of Southwest’s pilot union, “and keep it from recurring.” Boeing officials told Southwest union leaders that they didn’t believe any extra training was necessary beyond informing the pilots of how the software fix would function.<br/>