The Federal Aviation Administration said Friday it will allow Boeing to produce more 737 Max airplanes by increasing the limit that was imposed after a door plug flew off an Alaska Airlines jet that the company built.
After the terrifying January 2024 incident, the FAA capped Boeing’s production of Max jets to 38 per month. In practice, the production rate fell well below that ceiling last year as the company contended with investigations and a machinists’ strike that idled factories for almost eight weeks.
The company said in July that it reached the monthly cap in the second quarter and would eventually seek the FAA’s permission to increase production.
The FAA said Friday that “safety inspectors conducted extensive reviews of Boeing’s production lines to ensure that this small production rate increase will be done safely.”
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The agency said this won’t change the way it oversees Boeing production processes and its efforts to strengthen its safety culture, and the FAA’s inspectors at Boeing plants have continued to work during the shutdown.
A Boeing spokesperson said this step followed a disciplined process guided by the company’s safety management system that allowed Boeing to demonstrate it could handle building more planes.
“We remain committed to implementing our Safety & Quality Plan and working with our suppliers to increase production in a disciplined manner,” Boeing said in a statement. “We appreciate the work by our team, our suppliers and the FAA to ensure we are prepared to increase production with safety and quality at the forefront.”
Neither the FAA nor Boeing said what the new limit will be in their statements on the move.
Just last month, the FAA also restored Boeing’s ability to perform the final safety inspections on 737 Max planes it builds and certify them for flight. The planemaker hadn’t been allowed to do that for more than six years after two crashes of the then-new model killed 346 people
Federal regulators took full control over 737 Max approvals in 2019, after the second of two crashes that were later blamed on a new software system Boeing developed for the aircraft. The FAA ended the company’s right to self-certify Dreamliners in 2022, citing ongoing production quality issues.
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