I just flew on the first Boeing 737 Max passenger flight since the plane was grounded. The flaws that killed 346 people were the least of my concerns.

David Slotnick/Business Insider

• I just flew on the first Boeing 737 Max passenger flight since the plane was grounded in March, 2019, following two fatal crashes.
• American Airlines operated the demonstration flight a few weeks before it reintroduces the Max to regular customer service.
• I felt confident that the flaws which contributed to the crashes have been fixed — but traveling during the pandemic left me less reassured than I expected.

In March, 2019, the Boeing 737 Max was grounded worldwide after the second of two fatal crashes caused by a flaw in the airplane. A total of 346 people were killed.

Today, I climbed aboard the plane for its first passenger flight in almost two years.

After 20 months of inspections, deliberations, hearings, redesigns, lawsuits, and debates, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the 737 Max to return to service, issuing an Airworthiness Directive to that effect in late November.

For the first year of the grounding, airlines eagerly awaited the plane's return, adjusting schedules, canceling flights, and losing money each month the plane was on the ground.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

Suddenly, airlines were forced to ground huge portions of their fleets as travel demand fell to record-breaking lows nearly overnight.

Although some demand has returned — particularly around Thanksgiving — travel remains down more than 65% compared to 2019 levels, and new, dramatic spikes in coronavirus cases nationwide make it likely that the modest recovery will stall, as it did around spikes in early summer.

With that in mind, most airlines are in no hurry to pull the Max from storage. United plans to return it to service sometime in the first quarter of 2021. Southwest, the biggest Max customer, will wait until the second quarter.

American Airlines is taking a different approach.

The airline plans to bring the Max back into passenger service before the end of the year — it's currently scheduled to fly between Miami and New York's LaGuardia on December 29.

Chief Operating Officer David Seymour said that the airline was eager to bring the plane back thanks to its improved fuel efficiency over other models, despite prices for jet fuel being near historic lows.

Erik Olund, managing director at the airline's Tulsa, Oklahoma 737 maintenance base — where most of its Max planes have been kept in storage — hinted at another possible reason. The airline's maintenance workers have spent more than 64,000 man-hours maintaining the planes while they are in storage, a costly enterprise.

As part of the return to service, the airline plans to invite some passengers to tour the plane, with pilots and other employees describing the changes that Boeing made to repair the safety hazards that contributed to the crashes.

American also invited several journalists onto a Max demo flight, as well as a briefing and walkthrough of changes at its Tulsa maintenance base.

Despite the approval from the FAA and from other national aviation regulators, including in Europe and Brazil, family members of crash victims remain deeply suspicious of the plane, and characterized American's media event as a PR stunt.

"The promotional flight was arranged by the American Airlines marketing team simply because the company made the mistake of buying more Max aircraft than almost any other airline," Michael Stumo, whose 24-year-old daughter Samya was killed in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, said in a statement. "Passengers should avoid this aircraft because others are safer."

Nevertheless, the plane is set to return to the skies, and both Boeing and its airline customers are eager to restore passenger confidence in the jet after two years of damning headlines.

I've previously written that, despite the various complex problems and flaws that contributed to the two Max crashes, I would be comfortable flying on the plane when it returned to service. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is, although I was nervous about traveling as the pandemic seems poised to explode even further out of control in the US: This was my first flight on a plane since much of the country went into lockdown this spring.

Still, this appeared to be the first Max flight with passengers since the grounding (aside from employees of airlines, Boeing, or the FAA), although it was not a commercial revenue flight open to the general public. That's newsworthy, and I decided to make the trip anyway, relying on PPE and an abundance of caution to try to minimize the COVID-19 risk.

Here's what I thought after the first passenger flight.