Holding out no longer, US parks Max jets
After days of mounting pressure, the United States grounded Boeing’s 737 Max aircraft Wednesday, reversing an earlier decision in which U.S. regulators said the planes could keep flying after a deadly crash in Ethiopia.
The decision, announced by President Donald Trump, followed determinations by safety regulators in some 42 countries to ban flights by the jets, which are now grounded worldwide. Pilots, flight attendants, consumers and politicians from both major parties had been agitating for the planes to be grounded in the United States. Despite the clamor, the Federal Aviation Administration had been resolute, saying Tuesday that it had seen “no systemic performance issues” that would prompt it to halt flights of the jet.
That changed Wednesday when, in relatively quick succession, Canadian and American aviation authorities said they were grounding the planes after newly available satellite-tracking data suggested similarities between Sunday’s crash in Ethiopia and one involving a Boeing 737 Max 8 in Indonesia in October.
“The safety of the American people and all people is our paramount concern,” Trump told reporters in the White House in making the announcement.
The crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 took place just minutes after takeoff and killed all 157 people on board the jetliner, a 737 Max 8. The circumstances echoed an October accident in which a 737 Max 8 operated by Lion Air, an Indonesian carrier, crashed and killed 189 people.
Marc Garneau, Canada’s transport minister, said that data on the vertical path of the Ethiopian jet at takeoff and comparable data from the Lion Air crash showed similar “vertical fluctuations” and “oscillations.” Hours later, the FAA also said its decision came after the investigation “developed new information from the wreckage concerning the aircraft’s configuration just after takeoff.”
“Taken together with newly refined data from satellite-based tracking of the aircraft’s flight path,” the FAA said, the information indicated similarities between the Ethiopian and Indonesian crashes “that warrant further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents that needs to be better understood and addressed.”
“Since this accident occurred, we were resolute in our position that we would not take action until we had data to support taking action,” said Daniel K. Elwell, the FAA’S acting administrator. “That data coalesced today, and we made the call.”
Earlier, Ethiopian Airlines said that one of two pilots on Sunday’s flight reported “flight-control problems” to air-traffic controllers minutes before the plane crashed and told controllers that he wanted to turn back to Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa. The pilot was cleared to do so, three minutes before contact was lost with the cockpit, a spokesman for the airline said Wednesday.
That disclosure suggests that a problem with the handling of the aircraft or the computerized flightcontrol system could have been a factor. There has been no suggestion of terrorism or other outside interference in the functioning of the aircraft, which was only a few months old.
Officials examining the Lion Air crash have raised the possibility that a new flight-control system could have contributed to that earlier accident.
Elwell at the FAA cautioned that the investigation into the Ethiopian Airlines crash was incomplete. No determination as to its cause has been made, nor has any final determination been released for the Indonesian crash. The flight data and voice recorders, known as black boxes, in the Ethiopia disaster have been recovered and will be analyzed in France.
“We still have a lot to learn before we can say that they were the same cause and effect,” he said.
“We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution,” Boeing’s chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, said after the grounding was announced.
The accidents have put Boeing on the defensive. The low-cost airline Norwegian Air, which has one of the largest Max 8 fleets outside the United States, said it would seek compensation from the company because of the groundings.
The 737 Max is Boeing’s bestselling jet ever and is expected to be a major driver of profit, with more than 4,500 of the planes on order. The company’s shares have fallen about 11 percent this week.
“We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution,” Boeing’s chief executive, Dennis A. Muilenburg, said after the grounding was announced. “We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again.”
After the Indonesian crash, pilots’ unions complained that pilots had not been made aware of a change to the flight-control system on the Max that could automatically push the plane’s nose down in certain situations. That software change is believed to have played a role in the Lion Air crash and may have been a factor in the Ethiopia crash as well. Boeing is now planning to roll out a software update that has been in the works since the Indonesian crash.