Brazil’s ANAC, EU’s EASA proceed to unground B737 MAX

The Brazilian civil aviation authority (Agência Nacional de Aviação Civil – ANAC) became the world’s first regulator outside of the United States to unground the B737 MAX aircraft on November 25, 2020. ANAC said that it has withdrawn an Emergency Airworthiness Directive, issued against the B737-8 in March last year, and has instead directly adopted a US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) directive which includes mandatory software and hardware upgrades as well as MAX pilot retraining. The directive is effective immediately, although the implementation of the prescribed changes is likely to take a couple of weeks. According to the ch-aviation fleets advanced module, the only airline in Brazil operating the B737 MAX 8 is GOL Linhas Aéreas Inteligentes (G3, Sao Paulo Congonhas), which took seven of them prior to the type’s grounding in March 2019. It has a further seventy B737-8s and twenty-five B737-9s on firm order from Boeing. The airline hopes to restart the type’s operations by the end of this year. Meanwhile, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) published its own draft Airworthiness Directive ungrounding the B737 MAX and while its tentative requirements are identical to the FAA’s in terms of mandatory aircraft modifications, they differ in two main respects. Firstly, EASA explicitly allows flight crews to intervene to stop a stick shaker from continuing to vibrate once it has been erroneously activated by the system, to prevent this distracting the crew. Secondly, EASA has also, for the time being, mandated that the MAX’s autopilot should not be used for certain types of high-precision landings. The latter is expected to be a short-term restriction. EASA’s directive will be open for consultation through December 22, 2020. The agency said that it expects to publish its final directive ungrounding the type by early 2021. The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has yet to announce any specific timeline regarding the ungrounding of the B737 MAX in the country. According to the ch-aviation schedules module, American Airlines (AA, Dallas/Fort Worth) is the only airline that plans to resume B737 MAX operations by the end of 2020 with the first flight scheduled for December 29, 2020.