Boeing will hire hundreds of temporary employees at Moses Lake as it prepares for 737 MAX’s return to service
Aug. 20, 2019 at 12:06 pm Updated Aug. 20, 2019 at 12:15 pm
By Dominic Gates
Seattle Times aerospace reporter
Boeing said Tuesday it will begin hiring a few hundred temporary employees at Moses Lake to work on the grounded 737 MAX fleet and prepare the planes for return to service once regulators give clearance for the jets to fly again.
For the new temporary hires, Boeing is looking for avionics technicians, aircraft mechanics, airframe and powerplant mechanics, and aircraft electricians. The company will provide paid housing and a meal allowance.
When regulators finally clear the 737 MAX to return to service, all the grounded airplanes worldwide will need to have installed a new software package designed to fix the MAX’s flawed flight control system — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). That’s the system that was implicated in the crashes of the Lion Air MAX in Indonesia last October and the Ethiopian Airlines MAX in March, killing a total of 346 people.
In addition, because all the jets will have been parked for at least six months by the time final clearance is given, each will require extensive maintenance work on the engines and other systems, followed by a couple of check flights to make sure everything is working well.
Boeing said Tuesday the current plan for handling this maintenance work is that all MAX airplanes that have been stored outside the Puget Sound region, either by Boeing itself or by airlines, will be flown to Seattle and Everett for delivery. Moses Lake will serve as a nearby staging ground to do some of the maintenance work ahead of the Puget Sound-area deliveries to airline customers.
Boeing is not providing details on total airplanes or capacity at each of those locations.
The company reiterated that it plans to submit a final certification package to the FAA “once we have satisfied all of their requirements, which we currently estimate will occur on a timeframe to support an early fourth quarter return to service.”
The finalized submission to the FAA is expected next month, and clearance to fly again could come within a month or so of that. Some MAXs could return to service within weeks of that clearance.
However, for the three U.S. airlines that have MAXs in their fleets, all the maintenance work and pilot training that will follow will take a couple of months. All three, American, Southwest and United, have already pushed out MAX flights in their schedules until January.
Boeing said it will post the temporary job openings at
https://jobs.boeing.com, searchable by the Moses Lake location. These new hires will supplement Boeing permanent employees at the site.
Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or
[email protected]; on Twitter: @dominicgates.