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Boeing 737 Max set for January return to service in Europe

The troubled Boeing 737 Max has been declared safe to fly by the head of Europe’s aviation safety agency.

Patrick Ky, executive director of the European Aviation Safety Agency, said his organisation had “left no stone unturned” in its review of the aircraft and its analysis of design changes made by the manufacturer.

He told the BBC he is “certain” the 737 Max is now safe to fly.

EASA expects to give permission for a return to service in Europe in mid-January.

The 737 Max has already been cleared to resume flights in the US and Brazil.

The new generation aircraft was grounded in March 2019 following two crashes which killed a total of 346 people.

The first accident occurred in October 2018 when a Lion Air 737 Max came down in the sea off Indonesia.

An Ethiopian Airlines version then crashed shortly after take-off from Addis Ababa, just four months later.

Both have been attributed to flawed flight control software, which became active at the wrong time and prompted the aircraft to go into a catastrophic dive.

EASA has been carrying out a root-and-branch review of the 737 Max’s design, independently from a similar process undertaken by the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration.

Ky said the review went well beyond the immediate causes of the two accidents and the modifications proposed by Boeing.

“We went further and reviewed all the flight controls, all the machinery of the aircraft,” he added.

The aim was to look at anything which could cause a critical failure.

Existing aircraft will now have to be equipped with new computer software, as well as undergoing changes to their wiring and cockpit instrumentation to allow a resumption of flights.

Pilots will be required to take mandatory training, and each plane will have to undergo a test flight to ensure the changes have been carried out correctly.

US regulators have set out similar conditions.

As a result, Ky said: “We are very confident that it is now a very safe aircraft.”

Most of the initial safety certification work on the 737 Max was carried out by the FAA, and simply endorsed by EASA under the terms of a long-standing international agreement.

But Ky added that things will be done differently in the future after the FAA faced criticism for allowing an apparently flawed aircraft into service.

“What is certain is that there were lessons learned from this, which will trigger new actions from our side,” he said.

“We will perform our own safety assessment, which is going to be much more comprehensive than it used to be.

“I think we have made a lot of progress in assessing what went wrong and what can be made better

“I hope the public trusts in us when we say we think, we are certain, that the aircraft is safe to fly.”

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