BEIJING — Responding to the second crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 soon after takeoff in less than five months, China ordered its airlines on Monday morning to ground all 96 of the aircraft that they operate. The Civil Aviation Administration of China noted in its announcement of the grounding that both the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday and a Lion Air crash in Indonesia in late October had involved very recently delivered Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft that crashed soon after takeoff. The Chinese aviation regulator said in its announcement that it had notified Chinese air carriers at 9 a.m. that they had nine hours to take the planes out of service. But the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, a government agency that oversees the Chinese government’s large stakes in airlines and many other industries, announced on Weibo, a social media site, just an hour later that all of the carriers’ 96 Boeing 737 Max 8s had already been grounded, athough the posting was later deleted. Flight tracking websites showed that Chinese airlines were substituting Boeing 737-800s on Monday morning on routes where they had previously operated a Boeing 737 Max 8.

Source: New York Times March 11, 2019 03:11 UTC