The Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane is seen at Portland International Airport on January 9, 2024 in Oregon. The aircraft made an emergency touchdown following a midair fuselage blowout on Jan. 5. None of the 171 passengers and 6 crew members was significantly injured.

Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images

disguise caption

toggle caption

Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images

The Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane is seen at Portland International Airport on January 9, 2024 in Oregon. The aircraft made an emergency touchdown following a midair fuselage blowout on Jan. 5. None of the 171 passengers and 6 crew members was significantly injured.

Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration says Boeing’s grounded 737 Max 9 jets can start flying once more after a “thorough inspection and maintenance process.” But the company additionally imposed sweeping jet manufacturing restrictions on the firm’s factories.

It’s been practically three weeks since federal regulators took 171 Boeing aircraft out of service after a part of the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines jet blew out at 16,000 toes after departing the Portland International Airport.

“We grounded the Boeing 737-9 MAX within hours of the incident over Portland and made clear this aircraft would not go back into service until it was safe,” FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker mentioned in a press release late Wednesday. “The exhaustive, enhanced review our team completed after several weeks of information gathering gives me and the FAA confidence to proceed to the inspection and maintenance phase.”

The FAA’s announcement comes amid growing questions about quality control on the Boeing manufacturing facility the place the 737 was assembled.

An apparent Boeing whistleblower says that errors contained in the aerospace large’s plant in Renton, Wash. have been prone to blame for the incident. The self-described Boeing worker alleges that 4 key bolts which might be supposed to carry the door in place have been by no means reinstalled after upkeep work earlier than the jet left the manufacturing facility.

The FAA announcement didn’t point out these allegations. But the company has its own concerns about Boeing’s production and manufacturing processes.

“This won’t be back to business as usual for Boeing,” Whitaker mentioned, saying that the FAA wouldn’t grant any requests from Boeing to broaden manufacturing of the Max plane, “until we are satisfied that the quality control issues uncovered during this process are resolved.”

The manufacturing cap applies to Max 8 and 9 (that are in use all over the world) in addition to the upcoming smaller Max 7 and bigger Max 10 variants. Critics say Boeing has been dashing manufacturing to clear a prolonged backlog of orders following a earlier grounding of the Max plane following a pair of fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 which killed a complete of 346 individuals. Those crashes have been blamed on a faulty flight control system on the new planes.

Boeing declined to touch upon the whistleblower allegations, citing an ongoing investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. Investigators on the NTSB had beforehand raised the chance that the bolts on the door plug panel weren’t correctly put in.

Following the FAA’s announcement, Boeing mentioned it will work with regulators and airways to get the grounded planes again within the air.

“We will continue to cooperate fully and transparently with the FAA and follow their direction as we take action to strengthen safety and quality at Boeing,” mentioned a press release from Boeing spokesperson Jessica Kowal. “We will also work closely with our airline customers as they complete the required inspection procedures to safely return their 737-9 airplanes to service.”

United and Alaska Airlines have each been compelled to cancel 1000’s of flights whereas ready for this remaining inspection steerage from regulators and Boeing. On Tuesday, the CEOs of each corporations have been sharply crucial of Boeing in separate interviews.

In a letter to United workers on Wednesday, chief working officer Toby Enqvist mentioned the corporate would start the method of inspecting its fleet of 79 grounded jets.

“We are preparing aircraft to return to scheduled service beginning on Sunday,” Enqvist mentioned. “We will only return each MAX 9 aircraft to service once this thorough inspection process is complete.”