US President Donald Trump has bowed to pressure and grounded Boeing 737 MAX amid growing global security concerns.
The action of the president has embarrassed United Arab Emirates (UAE) and other nations who had announced they still had confidence in the US-made planes even after the Ethiopian crash that claimed the lives of 157 people on board.
The ban on the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft became worldwide on Wednesday after US President Donald Trump joined Canada and other countries in grounding the aircraft amid mounting global fears for the jets’ airworthiness.
US authorities said new evidence showed similarities between Sunday’s deadly crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 and a fatal accident in Indonesia in October.
The Federal Aviation Administration said findings from the crash site near Addis Ababa and “newly refined satellite data” warranted “further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents.”
An FAA emergency order grounded 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft until further notice.
Trump told reporters at the White House the “safety of the American people and all peoples is our paramount concern.”
Mexico late Wednesday suspended MAX 8 and 9 operations, after Canada and Chile also joined the long list of countries to ban the plane from flying in their airspaces. Many airlines have voluntarily taken it out of service.
Ethiopia said it would send the black boxes from Flight ET 302 to France for analysis, which could provide crucial information about what happened.
“Hopefully they will come up with an answer but until they do the planes are grounded,” Trump said.
FAA acting chief Daniel Elwell said the agency has been “working tirelessly” to find the cause of the accident but faced delays because the black box flight data recorders had been damaged.
The new information shows “the track of that airplane was close enough to the track of the Lion Air flight… to warrant the grounding of the airplanes so we could get more information from the black boxes and determine if there’s a link between the two, and if there is, find a fix to that link,” Elwell said on CNBC.