Boeing is temporarily cutting production of its best-selling 737 airliner in the continuing fall-out from crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia.
The production will drop from 52 planes a month to 42 frommid-April, Boeing has said in a statement.
The decision is a response to a halt in deliveries of the737 Max — the model involved in the two accidents, the BBC reported.
The plane is currently grounded as preliminary findingssuggest its anti-stall system was at fault.
An Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashed only minutes aftertake-off from Addis Ababa in March, killing all 157 people on board.
The same type flown by the Indonesian airline Lion Aircrashed into the sea only five months earlier, shortly after taking off fromJakarta. That accident claimed the lives of 189 people.
In both cases, preliminary findings showed the pilots hadwrestled with the anti-stall system, known as MCAS, which caused the planes tonose-dive repeatedly.
A report from the Ethiopian authorities issued on Thursdaysaid the pilots of flight ET302 “repeatedly” followed proceduresrecommended by Boeing before the crash.
“We now know that the recent Lion Air Flight 610 andEthiopian Airlines Flight 302 accidents were caused by a chain of events, witha common chain link being erroneous activation of the aircraft’s MCAS function.We have the responsibility to eliminate this risk, and we know how to doit,” the statement from Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg said.
He repeated that Boeing was making progress on updating the MCAS software and finalising new training for Max pilots.