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Boeing 737: Trump's government shutdown delayed fixes to airplane involved in multiple deadly crashes
Fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash follows multiple warnings from US pilots to Washington during shutdown of 'significantly reduced' oversight
Fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash follows multiple warnings from US pilots to Washington during shutdown of 'significantly reduced' oversight
Though the cause of the latest accident remains under investigation, the plane company said in a press conference on Tuesday it had been working on the update over “the past several months” to address a feature that reportedly caused one of its 737 MAX planes to nose-dive into the ocean last year, killing everyone on board. The two pilots on that Lion Air flight struggled to correct the issue as the plane plunged into the sea, according to investigators.
The fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash, which also killed all 157 passengers on the flight, followed the US government shutdown — the longest of its kind in American history — in which pilots warned Donald Trump and Congressional leadership that “certification and work on safety-related airworthiness directives” had been stalled by the federal closure.
A coalition of nearly 61,000 pilots wrote in multiple letters to the government during the shutdown that oversight at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had been “significantly reduced” or halted outright."
“There are also airline and aircraft manufacturing oversight activities that either stop or are significantly reduced,” the pilots association warned the White House in early January. “These safety and oversight inspections will potentially allow for the introduction of safety issues that put passengers and airline crews at risk.