potentially picking up that seat in a state that s trending more purple. but if you re stacey abrams and you hear a lot of people talking about beto o rourke for president, you have to think why not me. guys, thanks very much. garrett haake, mike memoli covering the campaign for us. we ve got breaking news. an update on the boeing 737 max 8. the european union aviation agency is suspending all flight operations of the boeing 737 max 8 and 9. this puts pressure on the federal aviation administration here in the united states to ground these planes. boeing said in a statement they had full confidence in the safety of the 737 max fleet. another brexit deal vote is about to get under way. british prime minister theresa may has just 17 days to get a deal done but there s a sticking point called the irish backstop. we ll break down that what means next. you re watching msnbc. xt you re watching msnbc.
and airlines now taking this action is quite amazing. moments ago i talked to the former secretary of transportation under president obama, ray lahood. he reminds us that he grounded the 787 when they were having battery fire problems. you may recall he grounded the plane over objections of boeing and the faa. he said he s glad he did and he would grounding the 737 max now because he said we can t afford to have another one fall out of the sky. boeing says all of their engineers believe this plane is safe. i should make the point the faa does say it s going to mandate a change in the software design on the 737 max by the end of april. boeing says we were already working on that, faa is aware of it. that s already in the pipeline. but they expect to roll that out quickly. that would deal with the automated anti-stall system, which many experts believe may have been at the root of the
particular problem. here s where i depart from where boeing s philosophy has always been, you let the pilots know what systems they have and what they re dealing with. then if that system fails on them, then you have a checklist for it. and this was never communicated and we found that out after the lion air crash in october. pilots getting on this airplane now, i would not blame them for feeling uncomfortable. and i myself even as a passenger, retired airline pilot of 34 years, i would feel uncomfortable with this situation. however, in the u.s. i m confident that my colleagues would be able to handle a potential emergency with this thing. but what concerns me is i m very confident that the ethiopian crew was well aware of this lion air accident. and if they were facing the same situation, the same circumstances, the same factors and they handled the emergency the way boeing recommended, which is a very old procedure
relevant to this investigation? right. so the fear that if this is the case of the ethiopia crash as well, you re looking at airline that has suffered two losses in the first two years of service. this is terrible. the 777 went almost 20 years. the 787 hasn t had a single fatality. here you ve got this plane that is a legacy, real work horse plane. first flew in 1967. boeing has tried to just sort of keep updating it and keep putting a fresh coat of paint on it, as it were. here they tried to increase its performance by adding a new larger engine to an air frame that was not originally conceived to carry it resulting in performance issues which they tried to paper over by adding an automated system. they can be great for improving safety but in certain circumstances they can be very dangerous. i m assuming that american airlines and southwest, who fly
fly. they want to feel 100% sure. when you ve got all these countries saying, hey, we don t want to go on this thing, it s asking for people to go, you go, you re okay. despite statistics, u.s. air flying is very, very safe. when you adjust for terrorist accidents, it s remarkably safe, but people see these news items. it s remarkably safe because we have decades and decades of a culture of safety where safety comes before money. when you have an airline i m sorry, an aircraft manufacturer that has the appearance of wanting to preserve its profits as opposed to putting passengers at risk, that s potentially a problem. we re not just faced with whether airlines and countries will stop allowing this plane to be flown, the big question for boeing is are our customers going to stop ordering there. lion air has said it will switch its order from boeing to airbus. that s going to be very scary for boeing and its investors. and boeing shares are down