MAX’s Return Delayed by FAA Reevaluation of 737 Safety Procedures

[Peter H]

Originally Posted by Smythe

On the fix, validation of the fix, flight test and cert, who is going to do this? If the fix itself was reported to take 40 hours per ac?. Not certain what the fix entails yet, but most likely a very specialized team to do this. How many teams, and how do they decide where to go first?

The airlines then estimate another 100 to 150 hours of prep time per aircraft for flight?

Then the sim time....(after the fix and after the sims have been updated)

This is gonna take a while.

Originally Posted by DaveReidUK

Those numbers are very hard to believe. Where are you getting them from?

Don't know about the time for the fix, but Southwest seem to have said 120 hours prep per aircraft.

Extract from https://www.latimes.com/business/la-...524-story.html

Southwest, the largest Max operator, is already planning for the plane’s return even though it’s not clear if that is weeks or months away. “It will be a staggered-type return to service,” said Gary Bjarke, director of contract services for the Dallas-based carrier.
Until then, Bjarke leads the team overseeing the upkeep of Southwest’s Max fleet parked on a desert plain in Victorville, Calif., east of Los Angeles. Southwest ferried all its Max planes to the storage yard in the days after U.S. regulators halted commercial flights.
Crews spent about 80 man-hours preparing each jet for storage, and Bjarke estimates it will take about 120 hours of work to get each single-aisle plane back into flying condition. In all, he said, the maintenance checks could take about 30 days before the last of the airline’s parked 737s rejoin daily operations.