It’s finally happening. President Trump has now issued an emergency order of prohibition regarding all flights of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 737 MAX 9. This means all American, Southwest, and United Boeing 737 MAX flights are grounded effective immediately.
This means the US is only 24-48 hours behind the rest of the world, and in the process I’d say Boeing, the FAA, American, Southwest, and United, have all lost quite a bit of good faith in the process.
Now we’ll have to wait and see just how long this lasts.
As an update, the FAA has now issued the below statement regarding the grounding, indicating that this decision was made based on new information:
The FAA is ordering the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft operated by U.S. airlines or in U.S. territory. 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 FAA this morning, led to this decision. The grounding will remain in effect pending further investigation, including examination of information from the aircraft’s flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders. An FAA team is in Ethiopia assisting the NTSB as parties to the investigation of the Flight 302 accident. The agency will continue to investigate.
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