FAA certifies Boeing 737 Max 10 after nine years of delays

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FAA clears the way for airlines to put Boeing’s long-delayed 737 Max 10 into service – WTOP News wtop.com

The Federal Aviation Administration has certified Boeing's 737 Max 10 for passenger service, clearing the largest variant of the 737 family for deliveries nine years after it was unveiled at the Paris air show in 2017. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called the approval "a major win for American manufacturing" following what he described as thousands of hours of test flights. The Max 10 was designed to compete with Airbus's A321neo, which entered service in 2017 and has spent the intervening years selling into the market Boeing could not reach. Boeing's 2020 annual report promised first deliveries in 2023; the company now expects to begin Max 10 deliveries in 2027. CEO Kelly Ortberg said last month that the Max 10 accounts for roughly 30 percent of Boeing's 737 backlog, which the company's website lists at more than 4,500 aircraft — a decade of production parked behind a certificate that arrived a decade late. The delays trace back to the Max 8 crashes in 2018 and 2019, which killed 346 people off Indonesia and in Ethiopia and exposed the FAA's delegation of certification work to Boeing itself. The response was not sharper oversight of specific failure modes but process layered on process: the FAA overhauled how it certifies Boeing aircraft, and only over the past 18 months has it gradually eased restrictions, raising the cap on how many planes Boeing may produce and, in July, letting the company once again issue airworthiness certificates for finished 737 Max and 787 jets. Each certification requirement the agency added was paid for somewhere, and the bill landed on Boeing's market share rather than on the regulator. The A321neo, the plane the Max 10 was built to answer, has carried passengers for nearly a decade. Rising jet fuel costs amid the U.S. war with Iran now add pressure on airlines to renew fleets with the more efficient aircraft they could not buy from Boeing in the meantime. The Max 10 is longer than its siblings and cannot be arranged nose-to-tail on the Renton production line, so Boeing will build it in Everett — where Duffy was scheduled to speak Tuesday.