Donald Trump Hopes Boeing 737 Max Fleet Grounding "is For A Short Period"

(RTTNews) - President Donald Trump on Thursday said he hopes the grounding of Boeing's 737 Max jets is only "for a short period of time."

While speaking to reporters during a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, Trump said his administration had to take a "cautionary route" by grounding the jets.

"I hope it is for a short period of time," Trump said. "The biggest thing is, they have to find out what it is. I'm not sure that they know, but I thought we had to do it, we had to take a cautionary route," Trump said.

On Wednesday, Trump and FAA grounded all Boeing 737 Max jets in the U.S.

"We're gonna be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 max 8 and the 737 max 9 and planes associated with that line," Trump told.

The Federal Aviation Administration, in a statement issued, said "the agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed today. This evidence, together with newly refined satellite data available to FAA this morning, led to this decision."

The EU had earlier announced that it was grounding the planes after the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday, which killed 157 people. The same plane, operated by Indonesia's Lion Air, crashed in October 2018, killing all 189 people.

Despite the European Union and several other countries temporarily banning the Boeing 737 Max jets soon after the accident, the U.S. President and FCC officials delayed the grounding of the planes because they found "no basis" for barring flights.

Meanwhile, Boeing has grounded its entire global fleet of 737 Max aircraft after investigators uncovered new evidence at the scene of the fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash. The US plane-maker said it would suspend all 371 of the aircraft.