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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @03:08PM
The extra training that Southwest uses will not be mandatory. Boeing will really fight that because it would break certification. That would make airlines much less interested in buying the aircraft. Nearly the whole point of this awful design is to avoid needing to train pilots.
The other trouble is that the grandfathered certification would be lost. Extra requirements would then be added, such as triple-redundant sensors, jacking up the cost of the aircraft. If that happens, Boeing might as well just design a totally new aircraft.