Two Boeing 737 crashes have occured in less than half a year - raising worry for the safety of the rest of these planes, and resulting in them being grounded till they find a solution.
The most recent crash of the Boeing 737 airliner was on the 10th of March, an Ethiopian airliner that claimed the lives of al l157 people on board after it crashed, with no survivors. Investigators have reached a conclusion that the cause of the crash was a result of a faulty anti-stall system.
The plane had taken off and was only 450ft (137m) above the ground when its nose began to pitch down. The last words that were captured on the flight recorder of the plane - the black box - were “pitch up, pitch up!”, the last ones before the radio stopped working. Six minutes into the journey, it crashed in the town of Bishoftu.
The other crash in the last 5 months, also involving a Boeing 737, was around 5 months before the last, on the 29th of October, 2018, with the Lion Air jet that plunged into the Java Sea and killed 187 people, and possibly due to the same reason - a faulty anti-stall system - and these two crashes have caused the Boeing company to do a planned software fix, which would prevent any further problems with the aircrafts, and reduce any concerns about the system.
The United States issued an emergency order on Wednesday that grounded all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in the wake of the Ethiopian airliner crash on March 10th, which was a contrary order for the US after federal aviation regulators had said that it had no data to show the jets are unsafe, so carried on flying it.
The decision came hours after Canada joined some 40 other countries in excluding the 737 MAX from its airspace, saying satellite tracking data showed possible but unproven similarities between the two crashes of the Ethiopian plane and the Lion Air plane crashes less than half a year apart. The US, one of the last countries to ground the planes, grounded both the MAX 8 and MAX 9 variants of the plane.
