By Ogova Ondego
Published March 15, 2019
United States of America, the home of aircraft manufacturer Boeing, has on March 14, 2019 been forced into suspending the Boeing 737 Max 8 and Boeing 737 Max 9 due to mounting global pressure after two fatal plane crashes that have claimed 346 lives onboard Boeing 737 Max 8 airliners operated by Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air over a five-month period.
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As the list of countries–Ethiopia, China, Indonesia, Singapore, Mexico, Mongolia, Cayman, Morocco, Mexico, Singapore, United Kingdom and Australia–that are banning the use of the the single-aisle commercial aircraft model in the wake of the Ethiopian crash in which 157 people perished on March 10, 2019 continued to grow and travel agents started adding a search filter to block Boeing 737 MAX in their queries, President Donald J Trump finally directed the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to announce the suspension of the Boeing Max plane model series.
Saying it ‘continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX’, Boeing said it had, ‘out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft’s safety’, recommended ‘to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 737 MAX aircraft’.
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“We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution. Safety is a core value at Boeing for as long as we have been building airplanes; and it always will be. There is no greater priority for our company and our industry. We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again,” a statement signed by Dennis Muilenburg, President, CEO and Chairman of The Boeing Company, says of the FAA’s decision.