Boeing cut production of its flagship Dreamliner and delayed the arrival of a successor to its 777 mini-jumbo, piling new pressures on a rejigged senior management team Wednesday as the continued safety grounding of its 737 MAX sliced Q3 profits. The planemaker also said it was delaying plans to step up production on its money-spinning 737 line in the Seattle area, and would not hit a record-level 57 aircraft monthly until late 2020, months later than previously planned. Despite the trio of industrial setbacks, Boeing shares were up 3.2% in morning trading as its steady estimate of a 737 MAX return in Q4 appeared to be eclipsing the downside of the 787 production cut and other problems, an analyst said. <br/>
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Boeing remains confident the 737 MAX will be cleared to fly in at least some parts of the world by year-end, even as it acknowledges that regulatory reviews of required changes are taking longer than its return to service timeline assumes. “We target regulatory approval for the 737 MAX return to service to begin this quarter,” CE Dennis Muilenburg said on the company’s Q3 earnings call Oct 23. Boeing began handing over final documentation to the FAA in September, and the “iterative ... review cycles have taken a little longer than originally planned,” he added. Among the key documents Boeing has provided are the system description for the updated 737 flight control system, which includes changes to MCAS. Boeing is still waiting on approval of final training elements that will accompany the changes. <br/>
The chair of a panel of international regulators that harshly criticised the FAA's certification of the now grounded Boeing 737 MAX will testify Tuesday before a Senate committee. Christopher Hart, a former NTSB chair who oversaw the review, will speak before the Senate Commerce Committee alongside current NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt, the panel said Wednesday. They will appear after the testimony of Boeing CE Dennis Muilenburg and John Hamilton, who is VP and chief engineer for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Muilenburg will then testify before a US House panel Wednesday. Congress is mulling changes to how the FAA delegates some certification tasks to manufacturers for new airplanes. In the 737 MAX certification it initially delegated 40% of the work to Boeing and later shifted more work to Boeing. <br/>
The FAA must work to restore “public confidence” in aircraft certification efforts after 2 Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the US DoT’s inspector general said Wednesday in a public report. The long-standing practice of delegating certification tasks to aircraft manufacturers has come under criticism from lawmakers and others after the 2 crashes in Oct 2018 in Indonesia and March 2019 in Ethiopia. The report said the FAA faces a “significant oversight challenge” to ensure that companies conducting those tasks “maintain high standards and comply with FAA safety regulations.” The report said that by March 2020, the FAA plans to introduce “a new process that represents a significant change in its approach to overseeing” aircraft designation efforts. <br/>
“Flight shame” -- flyers feeling guilty about their carbon footprint -- is a real phenomenon and will raise costs for airlines, consumers and companies, while catapulting emission offsetting into a big business, Citigroup predicts. The cost of offsetting planes’ carbon emissions could become as much as 10 times higher than the airline industry currently estimates, Citi analysts including Mark Manduca said in a note Wednesday. For economy seats alone, the cost could balloon to US$3.8b a year by 2025, hurting airlines’ earnings, they said. Groups such as Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion and activists are fuelling the flight-shame movement by highlighting aviation’s role in global warming. People shunning planes has already had an impact on passenger numbers in parts of Europe. <br/>
Following a meeting of the joint committee from the Ministry of Transport on the development of Thailand’s transport network to promote tourism, minister of tourism Pipat Ratchakitprakarn said Tuesday that he is planning to discuss with the transport and finance ministries the possibility of lowering aviation fuel tax for domestic flights to help lessen the burden of airline operators who are currently paying the tax for their passengers. The fuel cost, he added, represents 40-50% of total airline costs. Pipat added that the demand for airport slots is another problem that needs immediate attention, especially at Suvarnabhumi, Don Muang, Phuket and Chiang Mai, which have clustered flights all year long. “We are planning to talk to airlines in an attempt to persuade them to disperse their flights to less crowded airports,” he said. <br/>