The recertified Boeing 737 Max undertook its first U.S. commercial flight on Tuesday, almost two years after the plane was grounded worldwide following two disastrous crashes within five months in 2019 that claimed 346 lives.
The Max was banned in March 2019 after a Lion Air crash in October 2018 in Indonesia killed 189 people and then an Ethiopian Airlines crash in which 157 passengers and crew died.
American Airlines Flight 718 departed Miami International Airport at around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday and landed at New York's LaGuardia Airport at 1 p.m. The airline said it plans to fly the Max from Miami to New York and back through Jan. 4 before adding more routes.
“We've been engaged with the FAA, with Boeing, with everybody that's associated with the aircraft to ensure that safety is held at the highest level," Robert Isom, president of American Airlines, told reporters on Tuesday. "This aircraft has been checked out from top to bottom.”
An investigative report from the House of Representatives in September blamed Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration for the accidents, saying a "horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing’s management, and grossly insufficient oversight by the FAA," had led to the crashes..
