Aviation attorney would ‘absolutely’ still fly on a Boeing 737 Max

Aviation attorney Mark Dombroff told Hill.TV on Thursday that he would “absolutely” still fly on a Boeing 737 Max passenger jet despite President Trump’s emergency move to ground the planes after recent crashes. 

“I’ve thought about that and there’s really two answers to it,” Dombroff told hosts Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton on “Rising.” “One is, sort of taking myself out of the role of being someone involved in aviation, and aviation safety, and so forth, and the other is just as a father and a husband.” 

“I think it’s very easy to react on an emotional level and say better safe than sorry, I’m not flying on it,” he continued. 

“The simple fact is about a week or so ago I did fly on the Max before this accident occurred but after the Lion Air accident, and it did occur to me that I was flying on a Max, on a U.S. carrier,” he said. 

“But if I put my hat on, regarding aviation safety, I would absolutely get on the airplane,” he said. “Right now there’s orders for something in the order of 5,000 of them that Boeing has. There’s something in the order of 500 of them flying so far in the world. There’s about 65 or so flying in the United States that are affected by the actual grounding order from the [Federal Aviation Administration].” 

Trump made the emergency order to ground the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft after Canada and the European Union took similar action in the wake of an Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday that killed all 157 people on board. 

That crash came months after another 737 Max 8 crashed during a Lion Air flight, killing 189 in Indonesia in October. 

“The grounding will remain in effect pending further investigation, including examination of information from the aircraft’s flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders,” the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. 

— Julia Manchester