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TRANSPORTATION BUSINESS - JAKARTA. The Transportation Ministry has temporarily grounded all Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in Indonesia pending airworthiness inspections, following the crash of one of the planes in Ethiopia.
The ministry’s Air Transportation Director General Polana B. Pramesti said the decision was made to ensure the safety of Indonesia’s aviation industry.
“One of the steps that the Air Transportation Directorate General will take is to conduct inspections and temporarily ground the planes to ensure they are airworthy,” she said in a statement on Monday. “This step has been approved by the Transportation Ministry.”
She said the inspections would start on Tuesday and that planes that were found to have problems would be grounded until they were cleared by flight inspectors.
On Sunday, an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashed in Addis Ababa killing all 157 people on board.
The accident took place about five months after a Boeing 737 MAX 8 belonging to Indonesian carrier Lion Air crashed into the Java Sea, killing all passengers and crew.
Currently 11 Boeing 737 MAX 8s are operated by Indonesian carriers: one by Garuda Indonesia and 10 by Lion Air, the ministry said in the release. Lion Air has bought 14 aircraft of the Boeing 737 MAX series in total, including the one that crashed in late October.
