Federal safety regulators indicated Tuesday that they will keep full control over approvals of each new Boeing 737 Max built since the planes were grounded in March, rather than delegating some of the work to Boeing employees. The FAA said it told Boeing Tuesday that the agency will retain all authority to issue safety certificates for newly manufactured Max planes. Boeing hasn’t stopped producing the Max, although it slowed down the assembly line in April. The FAA’s announcement doesn’t cover planes that were approved before the Max was grounded following two crashes that killed 346 people. The FAA decision affects more than 300 finished Max jets currently sitting in storage. Boeing delivered nearly 400 before the Max was grounded. It is the latest move by the FAA to show its independence from Boeing. Lawmakers have accused the FAA of surrendering too much authority to the aircraft manufacturer in certifying the Max. Senior FAA officials appeared to know little about a new flight-control system on the plane, which played a role in crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. The FAA relied on analysis and testing by Boeing employees, whose work was supposed to be overseen by federal inspectors.<br/>
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A blizzard sweeping through northeastern Colorado on Tuesday blocked roads and caused hundreds of flight cancellations, thwarting the Thanksgiving travel plans of some of the millions of Americans expected to fly or drive this week. 18 cm of snow had fallen in Denver by early Tuesday morning, causing more than 460 flight cancellations, the Denver International Airport said, and blizzard conditions were expected throughout the day as winds up to 72 km per hour in the eastern plains reduced visibility. Some 55m travelers planned to fly or drive at least 80 km from their homes this Thanksgiving, according to the American Automobile Association, but the snow would likely alter those plans. “We just landed at the Denver Airport! Crazy conditions. Literally 0 visibility,” tweeted Amber Kimbrell, a high school science teacher from Huntsville, Alabama, who posted a photo of a runway covered in white.<br/>
Portuguese air navigation service Nav Portugal has approved a project intended to increase the capacity of the capital's Lisbon airport. The project involves a restructuring of Lisbon terminal airspace and the conciliation of civil and military air traffic. Nav Portugal says it aims to raise the capacity of the airport to 72 aircraft movements per hour, compared with the present level of 44. Central to the plan is the ceding of airspace in the Sintra region from April next year and the partial ceding of Monte Real airspace from summer 2021. The intention is to reroute traffic and introduce a point-merge system at Sintra which will reduce the requirement for aircraft to enter holding orbits. Point-merge systems are designed to use a precision area navigation route structure enabling aircraft to be directed to a specific merging point – after following an approach leg of appropriate sequencing distance – without the need for radar vectoring.<br/>