The 737 Max may be back, but Boeing is still trying to get back on

One year since Boeing‘s embattled 737 Max returned to service — following the largest grounding in aviation history — there appears to be a broad consensus in the industry that the plane is as safe as any flying today.

“The question I get asked most frequently is, ‘Would you get on a Max?’ And the answer to that is yes, without question, and I would put my family on one,” aviation safety consultant and NBC News analyst John Cox, said in an interview with CNBC’s “American Greed.”

Much less clear, however, is whether, in its next generation of aircraft, Boeing can avoid the cascade of errors, shortcuts and management failures that led to 346 deaths in two 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 — blamed in part on the plane’s flight control system.

“I had hoped that this would be a major reckoning. They would bring in someone new and they would say, ‘No, we’re going to go back to being what we were — the best aerospace engineering company in the world and we’re not going to watch the daily stock price.’ But that didn’t happen,” U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio, D-Oregon, said in an interview.

After all, many of the forces within Boeing that investigators have linked to the crashes — including fierce competition with rival Airbus, as well as pressures to cut costs and speed up production — have only gotten more intense as the company tries to regain lost ground. The crisis has cost Boeing some $20 billion, not to mention a significant share of the crucial, single-aisle market now dominated by the Airbus A320.

Even after the return of the Max, Boeing’s commercial airliner deliveries lagged Airbus in 2021.

Last year, Boeing agreed to pay $2.5 billion in fines in a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department to settle charges the company hid critical information about the Max from regulators and the public. But DeFazio called the penalty a “slap on the wrist,” and has decried what he calls an ongoing “culture of concealment” at Boeing.

In a statement to “American Greed,” the Chicago-based company said the crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 led to fundamental reforms.

“Since the accidents, Boeing has made significant changes as a company, and to the design of the 737 Max, to ensure that accidents like those never happen again,” the statement said.