China operates first Boeing 737 Max passenger flight since 2019

Boeing’s 737 Max finally returned to commercial service in China after a nearly four-year absence, a major boost to one of America’s top exporters in its most important foreign market. China Southern, the country’s largest airline, operated the service Friday using the first 737-8 Max that Boeing delivered to it in November 2017. A Chinese airline hadn’t flown passengers on a Max since the model was grounded in March 2019 following crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people. The flight took off from Guangzhou at 12:45 p.m. local time, heading to Zhengzhou, according to tracking data from FlightRadar24 and VariFlight. That’s about a 2 1/2-hour journey. No other Chinese airlines have scheduled Max services yet. Boeing’s best-selling aircraft is now flying again in the world’s major markets aside from Russia. China, the first country to ground the Max after the Ethiopia disaster, approved its return to service in December 2021, saying it was satisfied with updates to software linked to the crashes. But Chinese airlines refrained from rushing the Max back amid strained US-China relations. China took about a third of the 737 jets that Boeing built in the years before the grounding. The nation’s top carriers — China Southern, Air China, and China Eastern — are all Max customers, along with about 10 others. The Max will likely be needed to help meet a surge in demand after China ended its Covid travel restrictions and reopened its borders. The volume of flights within China — the biggest domestic air travel market in the world — has recovered to 98% of pre-Covid levels since the curbs were eased, according to VariFlight data.<br/>