India's air safety regulator said on Thursday it had cleared Boeing Co's 737 MAX aircraft to fly with immediate effect, ending its nearly two-and-a-half-years of regulatory grounding in a key travel market for Boeing.

       SpiceJet Ltd, India's second-largest airline by market share and the only one in the country to fly the 737 MAX aircraft, said earlier in the day it had signed a settlement with lessor Avolon on leases for the aircraft.

       SpiceJet has more than 100 737 MAX planes on order.

       Around 175 countries have allowed the 737 MAX to return to service following a safety ban, with 30 airlines already restarting their MAX aircraft services.

       China is now the only major market where regulators are yet to give the MAX a go-ahead. Boeing earlier this month conducted a test flight of the 737 MAX plane in China.

       Boeing and SpiceJet did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment after the regulator's nod.

       On March 13, 2019, all Boeing 737 MAX planes were grounded in India by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) after the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX plane on March 10 near Addis Ababa, which had left 157 people, including four Indians, dead.

       Aircraft manufacturer Boeing has been modifying the 737 MAX plane since March 2019 so that various countries' regulators, including the DGCA, permit its passenger flight operations again.

       In its order dated August 26, 2021, the DGCA stated that the operation of Boeing 737 MAX planes are permitted "only upon satisfaction of applicable requirements for return to service".

       A senior DGCA official confirmed that the ban on 737 MAX planes' commercial flight operations has been lifted.

       (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)