US finally grounds Boeing 737 MAX planes, citing ‘new evidence’ from Ethiopia crash site
- The FAA said new data suggested similarities between Sunday’s deadly crash of an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX and October’s crash of a Lion Air plane
- The US announcement came hours after Canada grounded its fleet of 737 MAX planes
The US Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order on Wednesday grounding all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian airliner that killed 157 people, a reversal for the US after federal aviation regulators had maintained it had no data to show the jets are unsafe.
The decision came hours after Canada joined some 40 other countries in barring the 737 MAX from its airspace, saying satellite tracking data showed possible but unproven similarities between the Ethiopian Airlines crash and a Lion Air crash involving the model five months ago. The US, one of the last holdouts, grounded both the MAX 8 and MAX 9 variants of the plane.
Daniel Elwell, acting head of the FAA, said enhanced satellite images and new evidence gathered at the crash site led his agency to ground the jets.
The data, he said, linked the behaviour and flight path of Ethiopian Airline’s MAX 8 to data from the crash of the Lion Air jet that plunged into the Java Sea and killed 187 people on October 29.
“Evidence we found on the ground made it even more likely that the flight path was very close to Lion Air’s,” Elwell told reporters on a conference call Wednesday.