⁍ The FAA’s Steve Dickson is due to conduct a two-hour evaluation flight at the controls of a Boeing 737 MAX.

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⁍ The flight is another milestone in the U.S. planemaker’s quest to persuade the FAA to lift a March 2019 grounding order.

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⁍ If Dickson’s flight and broader reviews go well, the FAA is seen as likely to lift its U.S. grounding order in late November.

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– It’s a big day for Boeing and the FAA. The agency’s chief, Steve Dickson, will conduct a two-hour evaluation flight at the controls of a Boeing 737 MAX on Wednesday in a move that could lead to the US lifting its ban on the jet within months, Reuters reports. Dickson, a former military and commercial pilot, has said he won’t sign off on any modifications to the jet until he flies it himself. The two-hour flight at Seattle’s King County International Airport is a key step in Boeing’s effort to get the FAA to lift its ban on the jet, which was issued after two fatal crashes—in Ethiopia and Indonesia—in five months. Dickson will test a number of Boeing design and operations upgrades intended to prevent similar disasters. In both crashes, a flawed control system known as MCAS, triggered by faulty data from a single airflow sensor, repeatedly and forcefully pushed down the jet’s nose as pilots struggled to intervene. If Dickson’s flight and broader reviews go well, the FAA is seen as likely to lift its US grounding order in late November, industry sources say, putting the MAX on a path to resume commercial service potentially before year-end. That timeline jibes with comments last week from Dickson’s counterpart in Europe, Patrick Ky. Ky said the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) expects to lift its technical ban ‘not long’ after the FAA, but national operational clearances needed for individual airlines to resume flying could take longer.