Skift Take
The worldwide grounding of the Boeing 737 Max fleet “out of an abundance of caution” is a break with the FAA’s traditional data-driven approach to accident investigations. Could this mean an end to the way safety decisions have been made?
The U.S. grounding Wednesday of the Boeing 737 Max fleet worldwide capped a stunning series of unprecedented events in the days after the fatal crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 last Sunday. The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) decision to ground the fleet based on third-party satellite data ended decades of the agency’s practice of evaluating data from the aircraft’s “black boxes” and from investigations on the ground.
The FAA made the historic decision based on data from satellite-navigation company Aireon, which tracked the flight with its satellite-based Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system.
This is the first time the FAA has used third-party data alone in grounding a commercial fleet. Boeing and Aireon refined the preliminary data on Tuesday, a capability FAA said it didn’t have. By Wednesday, the FAA said it had seen enough to make a decision.
“It became clear to all parties that the track of the Ethiopian flight was very close and behaved very similarly to the Lion Air flight,” Acting FAA Administrator Daniel K. Elwell told reporters on March 13.
Ethiopian Flight 302 crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, killing all 157 passengers and crew on board, and Lion Air Flight 610, with 189 fatalities, went down off the coast of Indonesia shortly after takeoff last October. Both flights were operated with Boeing 737-8 Max aircraft.
Elwell noted the “evidence
