Singapore Airlines Ltd’s SilkAir has relocated the first of its six Boeing Co 737 MAX aircraft to central Australia for storage, as the global grounding of the jet continues following two deadly crashes in the past 12 months.
Boeing pilots flew the aircraft to Alice Springs yesterday, Singapore Airlines said in an e-mailed statement.
The Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) on Friday said that SilkAir would begin transferring its planes today.
The relocation “has been facilitated with permission from civil aviation authorities in Australia, Indonesia and Singapore,” the airline said.
“The remaining five aircraft will be progressively relocated,” it said, without providing details on timing.
CASA spokesman Peter Gibson said on Friday that the aircraft would be flown by experienced Boeing pilots using a “flight profile which ensures there can be no activation of MCAS,” referring to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System feature linked to the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people between them.
The pilots received training in case an MCAS-related event occurs, he said.
It is still unclear when the 737 MAX will resume scheduled flights, because investigations by authorities around the world are ongoing.
CASA said it is following flight profiles for ferrying the aircraft in the US, Canada and Europe.
In one California facility, the cost of storage runs to about US$2,000 per month for a plane, according to an industry veteran.
The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that Boeing left off “key safeguards” from the 737 MAX’s anti-stall system that were included on an earlier version of the system used on a military tanker aircraft.
The earlier version of the system relied on multiple sensors and had “limited ability to move the tanker’s nose,” while the MAX’s version received input from just one sensor and was “tougher for pilots to override,” the newspaper said.
The Wall Street Journal cited a person familiar with the system as saying that the earlier version was designed to guard against problems.
“You don’t want the solution to be worse than the initial problem,” the person said.
A Boeing spokesman told the newspaper that the systems were “not directly comparable.”
Additional reporting by AFP
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