Indonesia, China, Singapore and Australia have suspended all Boeing 737 MAX flights in the wake of the fatal crash in Ethiopia that claimed 157 lives, just months after the same model of plane crashed off the coast of Indonesia.
Aviation authorities are divided on the risks posed to traveller safety. The United States stressed it was safe to fly the planes but Singapore’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAAS) showed question-marks hanging over the aircraft after Sunday’s disaster could not be dispelled so fast.
Singapore has temporarily barred Boeing 737 MAX flights in and out of the country.
Several airlines serving UK airports are continuing to fly the aircraft model involved in the deadly crash.
TUI Airways has the only five 737 Max 8 aircraft operated by a UK-based airline, and is due to begin flying a sixth later this week.
Asked if the airline would take any action in response to the crash, a spokesman for parent company TUI said: “We have no indication that we can’t operate our 737 Max in a safe way like we do with all other planes in our network.”
Scandinavian airline Norwegian, which serves London Gatwick, Manchester and Edinburgh in the UK, has 18 Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft.
A number of airlines have grounded their fleet of the aircraft model, including Royal Air Maroc, Cayman Airways, Mongolian Airlines and Comair, which is a British Airways franchise in southern Africa, the Press Association reports.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a “continued airworthiness notification” for the 737 MAX late on Monday to assure operators, and detailed a series of design changes mandated by Boeing.
Boeing issued a statement as well, saying it had been working with the FAA in the aftermath of a Lion Air crash to develop enhancements to flight control software that will be deployed across the 737 MAX fleet in coming weeks.
The new MAX 8 variant of the 737, the world’s best-selling modern passenger aircraft, has bigger engines designed to use less fuel. It entered service in 2017, and by the end of January Boeing had delivered 350 of the new jets to customers.
The Ethiopian Airlines jet crashed six minutes after taking off from the capital Addis Ababa.
Both the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were recovered from the wreckage.
While the cause is not yet known, the crash shared similarities with last year’s Lion Air jet crash in the Java Sea, which killed 189. That also involved a 737 Max 8 crashing minutes after take-off.
At least nine Britons and one Irish citizen were among the dead, as were scientists, doctors, aid workers and three members of a Slovakian MP’s family.