The acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration told NBC’s “Today” show on Thursday that there could be a connection between the two Boeing 737 crashes in the last five months.
The FAA ordered that all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 planes be grounded until further notice after a MAX 8 crashed shortly after taking off in Ethiopia last Sunday, killing 157 people. Last October, a Lion Air flight crashed less than 15 minutes after takeoff in Indonesia and killed 189 people.
FAA acting administrator Daniel Elwell said Thursday that these planes may have had the same cause for crashing.
“We got new information yesterday and we acted on it and it is in our minds now a link that is close enough to ground the airplanes,” he said.
When asked why the FAA waited longer than the European Union did to ground the jets, Elwell replied: “When the FAA makes a decision like grounding airplanes — any safety decision of that magnitude — we do it based on data.”
“We’re a data-driven organization. It’s why US aviation has been so incredibly safe and frankly why aviation has been safe around the world,” he added.
“You have to establish at least more than a gut feeling that two crashes are related before you ground an entire fleet.”
Elwell said that the U.S. and Canada, which also grounded 737 MAX jets on Wednesday, made the decision “based on new data and the data is what drove it.”
“I really don’t know what drove the decisions of the other countries,” he said.
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