started saying, where were these planes going to go if our nearest, biggest partner is no longer in the game, let s go ahead and do something. he did say that there is enough information about the crash in africa that led to this immediate grounding of the aircraft. we don t know what that information is. there s been a lot of anticipation about what we will get out of voice recorder and the data recorder from that plane. we don t know what that is yet and we don t know what this is about. remember, canada, when they stopped this earlier today, they said they were using new analysis of satellite tracking of airplanes and that contributed to their decision. we don t know if that information was shared with the administration and that s what made this happen. we do know that the president has been a very strong supporter of boeing and boeing has been a strong supporter of him. in fact, the acting head of the d.o.d. is a former boeing person out there. nikki haley, who just left as the am
i think grounding the aircraft until we have a good sense is the right move and i wish america had led on this rather than kind of responding to canada and many other countries. do you believe that boeing has been transparent enough in the process so far? it s hard you know, honestly, i don t want to throw stones. i represent families in airplane crashes. we may actually be in litigation against boeing out of this crisis, so i don t want to throw stones at boeing until we know more. let me turn to tom foreman who s joining us. gentlemen, please stay with me, as well. did the president have any choice here? the bottom line is this country was the last to ground these planes. yeah, pretty close to it. he was certainly running out of options. the president was mounting ever since the weekend, we started hearing more voices from the u.s. senate saying, you ve got to do something about this. some of them were a little timid to begin with,with but they were growing louder. and when
but all of those planes are grounded effective immediately. okay? okay, so the breaking news right now, the president saying an emergency order has been issued to ground this specific type of aircraft here in the u.s., the boeing 737 max 8. the u.s. was the lone holdout, up until this moment. justin, first, your reaction? i think it s the right call. i was going to say that at least until they ve read out the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder and we have a good sense of what happened, to err on the side of safety is the best option. but to err on the side of safety is what people have been calling for for days now! what s interesting is we re not leading here. yeah. the united states is not leading. other countries are leading on this issue. we re the nation that manufactures this airline. our ntsb are the best regulatory and safety investigative agencies in the world and we should have been more outfront.
i think some politics came into play here. where you have a sense of not getting in the way of boeing keeping these airlines flying and then you had two crashes. one in indonesia where no americans were killed and another one in ethiopia where only, you know, eight or so americans were killed. if this had happened in kansas, i think we would have acted a lot faster than we did. les, up until this moment, we know pilots unions were behind continuing to fly these aircraft. we know the faa, we know boeing, a number of airlines had issued their statements as to why they believe the aircraft were still safe and they were planning to make no adjustments. what s your reaction? what do you think was what tipped the scale? well, first of all, you know, i agree with i can t disagree with any of justin s statements. i m very curious as to what the catalyst was for the faa to finally reach to this point. as a pilot, all i can do is say, listen, we re driven to make the
aircraft. a database maintained by the federal government reveals several concerns here. one of them, quote, the flight manual is inadequate and almost criminally insufficient. still, the faa is standing by its decision to keep the jets in the air in the u.s., as is boeing, as is a number of airlines that use these jets. look at this. this is the live radar tracker for this specific type of jet, showing all of them over north and central america. pretty striking there. cnn aviation analyst justin green is the former president of the international air and transportation safety bar association and les avim is a retired pilot for american airlines where he worked for 34 years. les, because you re our pilot here, i want to start to get your reaction to some of these complaints. one captain writing, quote, an a auto pilot anomaly that led to a nose down situation. another captain writing in a report, the auto throttles failed to move to the command position during takeoff and climb. we hear