737 Max won’t fly until FAA is ‘satisfied,’ Elaine Chao says, defending agency

The United States will not clear Boeing 737 Max jets for flight again until federal officials are satisfied that Boeing has fixed its flawed flight control system, Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao said in testimony on Wednesday. Chao, appearing before House subcommittee hearings concerning her department’s budget, offered no timeline for the plane to return to service after the FAA’s decision to ground the jets on March 13. But she said Boeing appeared close to completing a software upgrade on a crucial sensor believed to have played a role in the crashes of two Max jets. An Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, killing 157, and a Lion Air 737 Max crashed last October, killing all 189 people on board. “The FAA will not approve Boeing’s proposed changes until the FAA is satisfied it is safe,” said Chao, who has come under fire for her department’s actions after the Lion Air disaster. Chao, reading from prepared answers at times, defended the FAA’s decision not to follow the lead of 40 other countries by immediately grounding the fleet, despite the possibility that the Ethiopia crash might have resulted from a flaw in a plane whose basic design dates to the 1960s. “The FAA saw no basis upon which to ground these planes,” she said. “It is a very technical organisation. It is very data-driven. They saw no data until the morning of Wednesday the 13th.” It was at that time, she added, that FAA investigators discovered “new information on the first three minutes of the Ethiopian” flight that revealed “parallel conditions” involving the two accidents. Chao’s critics have argued that she could have exerted greater pressure on FAA officials and avoided the appearance that she was endorsing the aircraft’s airworthiness.<br/>