President Donald Trump has given the orders to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to ground operations of all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft in the United States of America, as the US joins countries around the world to mount pressure on Boeing to ground 737 MAX.
This call is coming after the deadly crash in Ethiopia on Sunday morning.
President Trump in his statement on the Boeing airplanes said:
“The safety of the American people, of all people, is our paramount concern,” Trump said, adding that the grounding would take effect as soon as the planes landed and would continue until further notice. “Pilots have been notified. Airlines have been all notified. Airlines are agreeing with this,” he said.
Trump said the move to ground the Boeing airplanes was based on new evidence that had come to light he said:
“The FAA is prepared to make an announcement very shortly regarding the new information and physical evidence we’ve received from the site and from other locations and through a couple of other complaints,” he said. “We’ve had a very, very detailed group of people working on the 737 8 and the 737 9 new airplanes. We’re going to be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 Max 8 and the 737 Max 9 and planes associated with that line.”
Also FAA reviewed its previous stand on the Boeing planes, saying “the agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed today.
“This evidence, together with newly-refined satellite data available to the FAA this morning, led to this decision,” the FAA said. “The grounding will remain in effect pending further investigation, including examination of information from the aircraft’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.”
In an important caveat, Trump said the decision to ground the planes “didn’t have to be made” but was made for a number of reasons, he said, including “psychologically and a lot of other ways.”