FAA Hands Boeing Back Full Authority to Certify 737 Max and 787 Jets as Airworthy

The Federal Aviation Administration told Congress on Friday that Boeing will resume full authority to issue airworthiness certificates for all its 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner aircraft starting next week, according to CNBC. That's the paperwork that says a plane is safe to hand over to an airline and fly.

This isn't new territory for Boeing. It's getting back authority it lost.

How Boeing Lost This Power

Federal regulators stripped Boeing of self-certification for the 737 Max in 2019, after the second of two fatal crashes tied to a flawed automated flight-control system called MCAS, according to India Today. Those crashes involved a Lion Air flight in 2018 and an Ethiopian Airlines flight in 2019, according to CNBC.

The FAA later pulled Boeing's authority to self-certify the 787 Dreamliner too, in 2022, citing ongoing production quality problems, India Today reported.

Then came January 2024. A door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 mid-flight, according to CNBC, a near-catastrophe that reignited scrutiny of Boeing's manufacturing standards and led to fresh production caps.

Since last September, Boeing and the FAA had split the certification work, alternating weeks, CNBC reported. Now that arrangement ends.

What the FAA Says Changed

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford framed the decision as data-driven, not political. "Safety drives everything we do, and this step forward is only possible because we are confident it can be done safely," Bedford said, according to India Today.

The agency's own language backs that up. "During the past eight months, the FAA has seen comparable production quality findings when Boeing issued airworthiness certificates and when the FAA issued them," the agency said Friday, according to CNBC. In plain terms: Boeing's checks and the government's checks kept coming back the same.

Bedford also said government inspectors will keep overseeing Boeing's factories, but with the certification workload off their plates, they can spend more time hunting for defects earlier in the manufacturing process, per India Today.

Boeing did not immediately respond to requests for comment from either CNBC or India Today.

The Fair Concern Here

Skeptics have a legitimate point. Boeing has broken this trust before. The company's safety systems were called into question before the 2018 and 2019 Max crashes, and again before the 2024 door-plug incident. Handing back self-certification authority, even partially, means fewer independent government eyes on every single plane before it flies.

The FAA's counter isn't "trust us." It's eight months of parallel data showing matching results between company and government inspectors, according to CNBC. Whether eight months of matching findings is enough evidence to justify returning full authority is a judgment call, and reasonable people can disagree on where that bar should sit.

The Bigger Picture on Production

This certification decision doesn't stand alone. The FAA has also been gradually raising Boeing's monthly production cap on the 737 Max, which was imposed after the Alaska Airlines incident. That cap has climbed from 38 aircraft a month to 47 a month this summer, according to India Today.

The certification handback and the rising production cap tell the same story: regulators are loosening restrictions on Boeing across the board, betting that the company's manufacturing discipline has genuinely improved.

Where Coverage Diverges

The ground.news aggregation flagged that a majority of outlets covering this story lean left, with 63% of sources tilting left, 25% center, and 12% right by its count. None of the individual reports reviewed here (CNBC, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle summary, or India Today) actually contradict each other on the facts. The dates and figures line up across all three. The main variance is emphasis: CNBC leaned harder into Boeing's troubled history and framed the move explicitly as "a vote of confidence," while India Today spent more space on the production cap trajectory.

What Happens Next

The certification authority formally shifts back to Boeing starting next week. The FAA says its inspectors remain embedded in Boeing's factories under continued oversight. The open question is whether that oversight, paired with self-certification, is enough to prevent another Alaska Airlines-style incident, or whether it will take another failure for Congress and regulators to reconsider how much rope Boeing gets.