Boeing has new upgrades for its Boeing 737 Max 8 models

With two deadly crashes of the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircrafts operated by Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines in just 5 months, the newly introduced Boeing 737 Max 8 aircrafts are now raising safety concerns for passengers all around the world. And more recently Tuesday’s emergency landing of this MAX 8 model owned by Southwest Airlines is further attracting the attention of passengers worldwide about this model’s safety. In the last two weeks, these bitter incidents have led to many airlines and government bodies temporarily suspending the entire fleet of 737 Max 8 aircrafts globally.

Meanwhile most US airlines feel that this temporary suspension of these models by Boeing and US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is not causing much problem to their daily flight operations, considering that a major chunk of their revenue comes from other aircraft models and only a very meager percentage from Max 8 models. All affected US airlines have appealed to their customers to rebook their cancelled flights on alternate flights without any additional fees or fare differences. Southwest Airlines is also making news for temporarily parking 12 of their 34 suspended Boeing 737 Max 8 models in its fleet at California Logistics Airport in Victorville.

People worldwide are speculating about the lifting of this suspension but no one is quite sure when it’s going to take place. `Till date the exact cause for the recent two accidents hasn’t been ascertained by the plane maker – Boeing.

Boeing has just announced this morning that it now has a hardware fix and a software fix for its Boeing 737 Max 8 aircrafts. The plane maker plans to upgrade the Boeing 737 Max8s by installing a new hardware alert system which warns the pilots when sensors produce contradictory readings at no extra cost. The plane maker also has an upgrade to the software that was linked to the recent fatal crashes. This software upgrade will now automatically disable the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation system (MCAS) when the sensors pass contradictory readings to it.

Investigation on the crash involving Lion Airlines revealed that MCAS malfunctioned and forced the plane to crash-land into the sea. The FAA is convinced that both the fatal crashes involving Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines are very similar.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is now facing the heat for being the last safety regulator for grounding the Boeing 737 Max 8 flights after the Ethiopian Airline crash on March 10th.

FAA’s acting head Daniel Elwell has clarified on this and said that they suspended all Boeing 737 Max8s in the US only after receiving relevant information. “We may have been the last country to ground the aircraft, but the United States and Canada were the first countries to ground the aircraft with data for cause and purpose,” he said.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.