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U.S. Grounds Boeing Planes, After Days of Pressure
After days of mounting pressure, the United States grounded Boeing's 737 Max aircraft on Wednesday, reversing an earlier decision in which American regulators said the planes could keep flying after a deadly crash in Ethiopia.
The decision, announced by President 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 on 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.
Previously: Second 737 MAX8 Airplane Crash Reinforces Speculation on Flying System Problems
Related: Boeing 737 MAX 8 Could Enable $69 Trans-Atlantic Flights
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:23AM (4 children)
Every country on the planet had grounded these planes until the reason for this latest crash can be found out.
The FAA and Beoing should have done so within an hour of the last crash.
It could be the investigation finds that it was a meteorite that crashed through the plane, it could be that they find the pilots had fallen asleep, it could be that it was the same cause as LionAir and the modifications that SouthWest have had are all that's needed.
Until then a plane that's 500 times more dangerous than other similar planes in the 737 and a320 category was still flying, but only in the U.S.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:10PM
The country where profit is king and the populace is cheap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:50PM
Where are you getting this number? It at most has a crash rate 10x higher, but crash rates seem to drop as the plane gets more flights (crashes are more likely early on): https://i.ibb.co/bBVhF0Z/planecrash.png [i.ibb.co]
It could be all thes other planes had such "kinks" to be worked out when they had only 500k flights.
(Score: 2) by physicsmajor on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:14PM (1 child)
The FAA grounded them. Trump announced it, he didn't really make the call. Stop.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday March 15 2019, @07:39AM
That’s not the order of events, but I didn’t mention trump at all.
The order of events were countries from singapore to austrailia to France to Uk to Canada had grounded them, but the faa was still saying they were fine.
Then the faa finally changed their mind days after the second crash of a brand new plane in 6 months. Something that statistically was highly unlikely to happen without the cause of the two crashes being linked, and the first crash already blamed on the new plane.