BEIJING/SHANGHAI/Addis Ababa (Monday 11 March,2019) – China’s aviation regulator has today grounded almost 96 Boeing Co 737 MAX 8 aircrafts operated by its airlines as precautionary safety measures, after a deadly crash of same make plane in Ethiopia, as per sources.
On sunday, minutes after take-off, an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 bound for Nairobi crashed killing all 157 on board and prompted the carrier to ground the rest of its 737 MAX jets.
After the incident of its plane crash in Ethiopia Boeing’s shares dropped 9 percent in U.S. pre-market trade.
Boeing said the investigation remained in its early stages and it had no basis to issue new guidance to operators.
Experts say that unless a specific mechanical issue or component failure has not been identified grounding entire fleets of a specific make/model of aircrafts / planes is not a normal practice.
In October, a 737 MAX 8 operated by Indonesian budget carrier Lion Air crashed 13 minutes after take-off from the Indonesian capital of Jakarta on a domestic flight, killing all 189 on board. The 737 MAX 8 first entered service in 2017.
The cause of the Indonesian crash is also still not found.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said it would notify airlines when they could resume flying the jets, after contacting Boeing and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to ensure flight safety.
“Given that two accidents both involved newly delivered Boeing 737-8 planes and happened during take-off phase, they have some degree of similarity,” the CAAC said, adding the step was in line with its principle of zero tolerance of safety hazards. The 737 MAX 8 is sometimes referred to as the 737-8.
The grounding was due to safety concerns and not related to trade friction between the United States and China, Li Jian, the deputy head of the Chinese regulator, told reporters, the Yangcheng Evening News said.
“These are two separate issues,” the newspaper, which is backed by the government of the southern province of Guangdong, quoted Li as saying on the sidelines of a parliament meeting in Beijing.
Chinese aviation data firm Variflight said at least 29 international and domestic flights on Monday had been canceled and that airlines had swapped out the plane on 256 other flights that had been scheduled to use it.
China Eastern’s chairman, Liu Shaoyong, told financial publication Caixin on the sidelines of the Beijing meeting that it would only consider resuming 737 MAX 8 flights once Boeing issued a safety commitment for the jets and proved there was no aircraft design link between the two crashes.
A November preliminary report, before the retrieval of the cockpit voice recorder, focused on airline maintenance and training and the response of a Boeing anti-stall system to a recently replaced sensor but gave no reason for the crash.
Ethiopian Airlines said it had grounded its 737 MAX 8 fleet until further notice as an “extra safety precaution” even though it did not know the cause of Sunday’s crash.
Till Feb 2019 Boeing had delivered 350 of the 737 MAX family jets to clients, with 4,661 more in process to be delivered as per sources.