FAA Will Let Boeing Resume Certifying Its Own 737 MAX and 787 Jets as Airworthy

On July 17, 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration said it will let Boeing resume signing off on the airworthiness of its own 737 MAX and 787 aircraft, restoring a delegated authority the regulator had kept in its own hands since a January 2024 in-flight door-plug failure. The change takes effect the week of July 21, 2026.

What the FAA approved

According to the FAA, months of review left the agency confident that Boeing’s final pre-delivery safety checks are reliable enough for the company to issue airworthiness certificates on its own again. Since September 2025, FAA inspectors and Boeing had taken weekly turns performing those checks, and the agency said the two sets of findings were comparable throughout that period.

“Safety drives everything we do, and this step forward is only possible because we are confident it can be done safely,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said. Boeing said it “will continue to work under the oversight of the FAA in building safe, high-quality commercial airplanes that comply with all airworthiness certification requirements.” The FAA said its inspectors will stay in Boeing’s factories and will focus earlier in the build process on catching potential defects.

What an airworthiness certificate actually is

Every individual airplane needs its own airworthiness certificate before it can be delivered and flown, which is separate from the FAA type certificate that approves an aircraft design in the first place. Issuing those per-aircraft certificates is a routine step that manufacturers normally handle themselves under authority delegated by the FAA, one of the last boxes ticked before a new jet is handed over to an airline.

The FAA took that ticketing authority back for the 737 MAX and 787 after the Alaska Airlines blowout, part of a broader tightening that also held MAX output to 38 aircraft a month while Boeing worked through quality issues. The agency has since allowed production to climb toward 47 a month. Friday’s decision hands the paperwork back to Boeing but keeps the underlying oversight, the production limits, and the factory inspections in place.

Delegating this step is the norm, not a special favor. The FAA has never had enough inspectors to personally clear every aircraft coming off every production line, so for decades it has authorized manufacturers to certify routine airworthiness on its behalf under a framework called an Organization Designation Authorization. Boeing kept that authority for most of its work even during the tightest scrutiny. What the regulator withheld after 2024 was specifically the final MAX and 787 sign-off, and that narrow piece is what is now being returned.

The move also has a commercial edge. A jet can only be delivered once it has an airworthiness certificate, and deliveries are when Boeing collects the bulk of an aircraft’s price. Having FAA and Boeing take turns on the final checks effectively slowed the pace of sign-offs, so returning the task to Boeing should help the company work down its backlog of built-but-undelivered jets, the aircraft airlines have been waiting on to grow their fleets.