US grounds Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 jets

Less than one day after expressing confidence in Boeing's 737 Max fleet, the US government has decided to ground the plane involved in two recent crashes.

President Trump told reporters that the US was issuing an emergency order to ground both Boeing's 737 Max 8 and 737 Max 9 aircraft, following similar prohibitions in the UK, France, Germany, Australia, Indonesia, China and elsewhere.

Trump made the decision in concert with FAA acting director Daniel Elwell and US transportation secretary Elaine Chao and had spoken with Boeing CEO about the move as well. "They are all in agreement with the action," he said. "Any plane currently in the air will go to its destination and thereafter be grounded until further notice."

Satellite flight-tracking data, combined with newly discovered evidence from the recent accident, raised suspicions about a safety feature on the Max that was implicated in the Lion Air crash in October, Daniel Elwell, acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said in a briefing.

“It became clear -- to all parties, actually -- that the track of the Ethiopian Airlines flight was very close and behaved very similarly to the Lion Air flight,” Elwell said.

This comes a few days after one of Boeing's 737 Max 8 jets crashed shortly after takeoff in Ethiopia, killing all 157 passengers and crew on board. That was the second crash involving that plane in question; Lion Air flight 610 crashed in October last year, killing 189.

The move is a major blow to Boeing, which has lost billions of dollars in value this week as a nation after nation announced they were barring the aircraft from flying. The single-aisle Max family is the Chicago-based planemaker’s largest seller and accounts for almost one-third of the company’s operating profit.

Boeing dropped as much as 3.2 percent after President Donald Trump announced the grounding but recovered the day’s loss and ended up 0.51 percent by the market close in New York.

Affected planes will be grounded immediately upon reaching their destinations. The impact on U.S. travelers should be limited because there are only 72 Boeing 737 Max aircraft at three U.S. carriers: American Airlines Group Inc. Southwest Airlines Co. and United Continental Holdings Inc. That’s only about 3 percent of the mainline fleet at those carriers.

More than 40 nations had announced the grounding of the jet -- and in some cases a ban on flyovers of the plane -- in recent days despite reassurances from the FAA. The agency had said as recently as Tuesday there was no evidence to justify an action against the Max.

The voice and data recorders from the crashed plane have been flown to Paris for investigation, Ethiopian Airlines said in a tweet late Wednesday. Ethiopian authorities had asked France’s air-safety bureau to help analyze the devices.