Boeing needs a “few hundred” temporary employees to help oversee its grounded fleet of 737 MAX jets as the company works to return the planes to the skies.
The workers hired by the Chicago-based aerospace giant will assist with storage and pre-delivery of the 737 MAX at Grant County International Airport in Moses Lake, Washington, the company said.
Boeing is looking to hire “avionics technicians, aircraft mechanics, Airframe and Powerplant mechanics, and aircraft electricians,” who will get paid housing and a meal allowance.
Federal regulators, following their global counterparts, grounded Boeing’s fleet of 737 MAX this year in the wake of two crashes in a span of five months that killed all 346 passengers on board. Implicated in the incidents was the plane’s anti-stall system, called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.
The ongoing grounding, now heading into its sixth month, has rocked Boeing and caused U.S. airlines that flew the embattled 737 MAX to cancel thousands of flights through the fall. The world’s largest plane-maker posted a $2.9 billion loss for the three months through June and booked a $4.9 billion charge to cover concessions to airlines affected by the delays.
With the 737 MAX taken out of commercial service, Boeing has not been able to deliver any of the planes and cut production in April from 57 planes a month to 42.
After the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, the plane-maker set about developing and testing a software fix to the anti-stall system. Boeing completed the software patch in May and plans to submit an application to recertify the jets to the Federal Aviation Administration next month.
But it is ultimately the FAA and other global regulators that will decide when the grounding of the 737 MAX will be lifted. Boeing, meanwhile, is “working tirelessly to meet their requirements,” the company said.
FAA Deputy Administrator Daniel Elwell said last month the agency does not have a timeline for returning the 737 MAX to the skies.
“We have one criteria,” he told reporters at an airshow in Wisconsin. “When the 737 MAX has been — when the complications to it have been satisfactorily assessed, and the MAX is safe to return to service, that’s the only criteria.”
