By Skies Magazine | August 21, 2020 Estimated reading time 2 minutes, 33 seconds.
Now that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has completed its recertification flight tests on the Boeing 737 Max to validate the aircraft’s flight system revisions, Transport Canada (TC) will be doing its tests next week.
According to Reuters, TC is slated to be the first non-U.S. regulator to conduct flight tests on the 737 Max in hopes of recertifying the aircraft, after the FAA took nearly two months to conduct its certification flights.
These test flights come after Boeing completed its enhancements to the aircraft’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which was a major contributing factor in the two separate crashes involving the Max that killed a total of 346 people. While the MCAS failure has been the most noted problem with the Max, regulators in Canada and Europe identified a number of their own desired changes, reported on by The Seattle Times earlier this year.
In order to avoid a pandemic trip to Boeing’s facilities in Washington State, the OEM will fly to Vancouver to pick up TC officials, then fly back over U.S. airspace to conduct the flight tests, according to Bloomberg news. Those tests will be part of TC’s independent review on whether Canada will validate Boeing’s proposed changes to the aircraft to ensure its operational safety.
Reuters also reports that TC will participate in the U.S.-led Joint Operational Evaluation Board (JOEB) to evaluate the minimum pilot training requirements aboard the Max with partnering evaluators from Europe and Brazil.
According to Transport Canada, JOEB is currently planned for mid-September, and the scheduling and participation in such is “dependent on the outcomes of the current certification and validation activities.”
The FAA has said that “each country will make its own decision” on the Max’s return to service, though JOEB will be the “next milestone” in the process.
Why do again in Canada what the FAA has done? No reason at all.
Well, the 737 Max should only be certified to fly over Canadian airspace, clean without MCAS. If the plane is incapable of flying clean, it shouldn’t be certified. Period. The LEAP engines are over engineered for this 60’s designed airframe. There’s are other appropriate airframe and wing matings for this engine, but the 737 is not one of them.