Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) personnel predicted that the Boeing 737 MAX could be involved in more than a dozen fatal crashes over its lifetime if no software changes were made following the Lion Air Flight 610 crash in October 2018, which killed 189 people.
According to CNBC, the internal FAA review released Wednesday was dated December 3, 2018, more than three months prior to a second fatal crash involving the now-grounded MAX aircraft.
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed near Bishoftu, Ethiopia just minutes after takeoff this past March, killing all 157 people aboard. The FAA and other air safety regulators around the world grounded the aircraft days later.
According to the new document, if no changes were made to the MAX's flight-control software-which was implicated in both accidents-experts believed that the aircraft had the potential to be involved in at least 15 more fatal crashes over its decades-long lifetime.
In a statement, Boeing said that the FAA agreed that measures taken by the aircraft manufacturer after the Lion Air crash late last year "sufficed to allow continued operation of the MAX fleet until changes to the...software could be implemented."
"My highest priority is to make sure something like this never happens again," FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said during a hearing of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure this week, via CNBC. He added that the groundings "illustrate what we have done historically we cannot be satisfied with. We've got to continue to put process improvements in place."
Boeing has since developed a software fix giving pilots more control. However, Dickson recently confirmed that the recertification process for the MAX will extend into 2020, pointing out that "there are a number of processes, milestones, that have to be completed."
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