The American Boeing 737 MAX aircraft made its first test flight in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang, which was the beginning of the process of necessary tests for the resumption of its operation in China.This is stated in a message posted on Wednesday on the official account of Putoshan Airport in Zhoushan city (Zhejiang Province) on the social network Weibo.
The plane took off from this airport at 13: 06 local time (08:06 Moscow time) on August 11. The flight lasted about two hours. After that, the plane landed at Shanghai Pudong Airport, where it arrived earlier on August 7 from the American city of Seattle. This test flight can actually be considered the beginning of work on obtaining a Boeing 737 MAX flight certificate for operation in China.
In October 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX of the Indonesian company Lion Air crashed into the Java Sea shortly after departure, killing all 189 people on board. The second crash with an aircraft of this model occurred in March 2019 in Ethiopia, 157 people were killed in it.
After these disasters, the operation of this aircraft was suspended. The management of Boeing admitted that the cause of the crash of both airliners was a failure of the MCAS automatic control system. Later, the aircraft concern made changes to the operation of this system. In October 2020, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) recognized the aircraft as sufficiently safe.
