The first commercial flight on Boeing’s disturbing 737 Max jet departed for New York’s LaGuardia airport on Tuesday morning, Miami, nearly two years after the plane was grounded worldwide.
The Max was banned in March 2019 after a Lion Air crash in Indonesia in October 2018 killed 189 people, and five months later followed by an Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 people on board.
American Airlines Flight 718 left Miami International Airport around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday. The airline plans to fly the Max from Miami to New York and back until January 4 before adding more routes.
According to CNBC it capt. Sean Roskey announced on the plane’s PA system: “We’re flying a Boeing 737 Max,” to some applause from passengers, including the U.S. president, crew and other employees. “We have the utmost confidence in this aircraft. In fact, my wife is on board, ”said Roskey.
In September, an inquiry report from the House of Representatives blamed the crash squarely on Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration for their ‘repeated and serious failures’.
The crashes ‘were the terrible culmination of a series of erroneous technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing’s management and an extremely inadequate supervision by the FAA,’ reads the congressional report.
FAA administrator Steve Dickson, who flew the plane in September, told CNBC last month he was “100 percent confident” in the recertified 737 Max.
However, trust is not shared by all passengers. A new poll by Reuters / Ipsos shows that 57 percent of Americans said they would probably not fly in a Boeing 737 Max if they were told about the plane’s history.
Passengers on all American’s Max flights will be warned in advance, with the option to book, the airline said.
“Our promise to any customer flying on us is that if you board the 737 Max and you do not want to fly, we will allow it to change,” said David Seymour, chief operating officer of American Airlines.
Boeing is still facing dozens of illegal deaths by families of victims due to the safety issues that led to the accidents. The families of Ethiopian crash victims have urged regulators to ground the planes after new revelations in a Senate committee report released Friday found a series of failures in Boeing’s re-ratification attempt .
“It is outrageous that American Airlines is in fact rewarding Boeing for the corrupt and catastrophic process that led to the Max,” said Yalena Lopez-Lewis, whose husband, Antoine Lewis, died during the Ethiopian Airlines crash.
United Airlines plans to reinstate the Max from February 11, and Southwest, the largest operator of 737 Max aircraft, will use an earlier and second quarter of 2021 again, according to the announcement on its website.
American Airlines has ordered 76 Max aircraft to add to its current fleet of 24,737 Max aircraft.
“We will never forget the lives lost during the two tragic accidents that led to the decision to suspend operations,” Boeing CEO David Calhoun said in a statement in November. “These events and the lessons we have learned have reformed our company and further focused our attention on our core values of safety, quality and integrity.”