Steve Dickson, the Chief of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), will fulfil his promise and pilot a Boeing 737 MAX on the test flight from Boeing Field (BFI), Washington, the United States. Dickson is expected to personally fly the aircraft to publicly prove its safety on September 30, 2020.
In November 2019, Dickson told lawmakers that he was “not going to sign off on this aircraft until all FAA are complete, I fly it myself using my experience as an Air Force and commercial pilot, and I am satisfied that I would put my own family on it without a second thought.”
The MAX test flight, with Dickson behind the controls, is scheduled to depart at 9 a.m (PDT) from Boeing Field. It is expected that the flight will take up to two hours after which the Chief of FAA will take part in the news conference.
In order to be able to pilot Boeing 737 MAX, Dickson and Dan Elwell, the Deputy Administrator of FAA, completed the new pilot training in Seattle earlier in September 2020, reported the Seattle Times.