Boeing Grounds Entire 737 Max Aircraft Fleet

By: Yassmine ElSayed

CAIRO, Mar. 13 (SEE) - US plane maker Boeing has grounded its entire global fleet of 737 Max (371 aircrafts) following  investigators uncovered new evidence at the scene of the fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash.

The Federal Aviation Administration said fresh evidence as well as newly refined satellite data prompted the decision to temporarily ban the jets.

The FAA had previously held out while many countries banned the aircraft.

All 157 passengers and crew died in Sunday's crash. Ethiopian Airlines said on Thursday that the black box flight recorders from the aircraft have been flown to Paris for analysis.

"An Ethiopian delegation led by Accident Investigation Bureau has flown the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder to Paris, France for investigation," the airline wrote on Twitter.

The FAA has a team investigating the disaster at the Ethiopian Airlines crash site working with the National Transportation Safety Board.

Dan Elwell, acting administrator at the FAA, said on Wednesday: "It became clear to all parties that the track of the Ethiopian Airlines [flight] was very close and behaved very similarly to the Lion Air flight”. He was referring to the plane crashed in Java Sea, Indonesia last October, killing around 200 on board minutes after taking off.

Both planes were new, delivered from Boeing just months before their doomed flights.

He added: "the evidence we found on the ground made it even more likely the flight path was very close to Lion Air's".