Lawmakers are likely to raise questions about a plan for a software fix to the jets that Boeing said it gave the FAA in January.
Federal aviation regulators plan to increase their oversight of air safety by this summer, the U.S. Transportation Department's watchdog told lawmakers Wednesday.
"We want to know how Boeing, how private companies, are involved in the FAA certification process," Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who chairs the Senate Commerce subcommittee on Aviation and Space, told CNBC's"Squawk Box" on Wednesday.
A key issue of the hearing will be how much scrutiny regulators gave the new design of the aircraft before signing off on it in March 2017. Investigators in the October crash of a Lion Air plane in Indonesia have indicated pilots were battling an automatic stall prevention system Boeing added to the jets before their debut. That program, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, repeatedly pushes the nose of the plane down if a sensor perceives the aircraft is in a stall.
Pilots said they were not aware Boeing had added the system until after the Lion Air crash. The FAA did not mandate simulator training, and some pilots said they received an iPad training course of about an hour to transition from the older models of the Boeing 737 to the 737 Max. Among the changes Boeing has made to the system are the use of two sensors that gauge the angle of attack — the angle of the plane relative to oncoming air — instead of one, and the limits on how many times the plane's nose will automatically tilt downward when MCAS is engaged.
The Chicago-based aircraft manufacturer outlined and demonstrate the changes to the 737 Max to pilots, airlines, regulators and media on Wednesday.
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