The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued yesterday a directive requiring airlines to perform regular maintenance checks of the flight control software on the Boeing 737 MAX and to periodically test the operation of the cut off switches used by pilots if system failures occur.
Boeing sent details of the maintenance regimen to all MAX airline operators in December, and this test was performed on all currently operating aircraft. The new order of the aeronautical authority regulates this additional verification since there is the possibility of a «latent failure».
The FAA said in a statement that all MAX operators in the US already included these inspections in their maintenance schedules and that it issued the directive «to highlight the importance of these inspections to other international regulators and to operators outside of the United States.»
Boeing said it «fully supports» the directive, which affects approximately 72 US-registered MAXs and 389 aircraft worldwide. The new FAA directive requires a verification of the entire flight control software system every 6,000 flight hours, is simple and can be performed during routine maintenance.
According to what was reported by The Seattle Times, an FAA official explained that the directive orders to verify the status of the entire automated flight control system, «including MCAS.» The directive states that periodic checks are considered necessary due to the possibility of a «latent failure» of some element of the flight control system, that is, a failure that may not be immediately apparent but may manifest itself later.
The directive also requires airlines´ maintenance personnel to verify that the switches on the pilot’s control console that cut off electrical power that send commands to moving surfaces in the horizontal stabilizer are working properly.
