WASHINGTON – Embattled Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg is bracing for a two-day grilling this week on Capitol Hill as he faces lawmakers for the first time over the 737 Max airplane that was grounded after its involvement in two deadly crashes.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee on Tuesday gets the first go at Muilenburg, who is poised to say that the company “made mistakes and got some things wrong.”

“We own that, and we are fixing them,” he will say, according to prepared remarks released by the company to Bloomberg News. "We have developed improvements to the 737 Max to ensure that accidents like these never happen again.”

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will be among those to press the Boeing chief. The Republican, who leads a Senate aviation subcommittee, said in March that the “crashes and subsequent reports on how the 737 Max was approved have badly shaken consumer confidence.”

He said he will ask Muilenburg to “explain what happened and what steps his company is taking to make the Max safe.”

“What went wrong on the regulatory process?” Cruz said. "Why did they sign off on a training system where the pilots aren’t told about this new operation that could endanger the system? And how can we fix it? How can we make it better?”

The moment is critical for Muilenburg, who on Wednesday will then endure further questioning about Boeing’s safety record and its response to the two international crashes from the House transportation committee, which includes Texans in both parties.

Among those keeping careful watch will be Dallas-based Southwest Airlines and Fort Worth-based American Airlines, which both rely upon the 737 Max.

The two carriers fumed in recent earnings calls with the media and investors about the ongoing challenge – and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue – created by the plane’s continued global grounding.

“We’re frustrated,” American CEO Doug Parker said last week.

“We are not happy about our situation,” Southwest CEO Gary Kelly likewise said last week.

Boeing has come under growing scrutiny since two 737 Max planes crashed within the span of five months. A Lion Air plane crashed in October 2018 in Indonesia, killing nearly 190 people, while an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed in March, killing nearly 160 people.

Much attention has focused on the 737 Max’s flight-control system, known as MCAS, that malfunctioned before the planes went into nose dives.

A Dallas Morning News report in May highlighted how Boeing officials resisted concerns that American Airlines pilots voiced about the system after the first crash. The News in March also showed that multiple pilots had flagged issues about the plane to the feds.

Other news reports have likewise raised questions about the Federal Aviation Administration’s airplane certification setup – and whether manufacturers and regulators are too cozy.

"Bureaucratic inertia is powerful," Cruz said in May, speaking directly to now-FAA chief Steve Dickson at Dickson’s confirmation hearing. "What I'm asking you to do, if confirmed, is: Be pissed off that 346 people died."

The FAA has defended its process, pointing out that the U.S. has one of the safest air travel systems in the world. But the agency bristled recently upon learning that messages among high-level Boeing officials showed concerns about MCAS years before the crashes.

In one of the messages, a top technical pilot at Boeing talked about “jedi-mind tricking regulators.”

Those exchanges are sure to come up this week as Boeing seeks to rebuild trust with lawmakers – and fliers all over the world. Muilenburg this month lost his title as board chairman, while the Chicago-based manufacturer also fired its commercial airplanes chief.

Muilenburg is poised to say on Tuesday that “our airline customers and their pilots have told us they don’t believe we communicated enough about MCAS — and we’ve heard them.”

It remains unclear when the 737 Max might return to the air, though the current timeline suggests early next year.

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