The acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday that the agency received new information that the Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets in the deadly Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights may have been brought down by the same cause.

“We are much closer to that possibility and that’s why we grounded the airplanes,” Daniel Elwell said on NBC’s “Today” show.

“We got new information yesterday and we acted on it and it is in our minds now a link that is close enough to ground the airplanes,” Elwell said.

The FAA on Wednesday ordered that all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 planes flown by US carriers be grounded until further notice.

Until the move, the US had been the last major holdout to ground the plane models. Many nations across the globe had already suspended the use of the 737 MAX jets from their airspace.

Last October, a MAX 8 operated by Lion Air crashed 12 minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board.

On Sunday, 157 people were killed when an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed shortly after takeoff in Ethiopia.

When asked why it took so long for the FAA to bar the jets from flying, Elwell said: “When the FAA makes a decision like grounding airplanes — any safety decision of that magnitude — we do it based on data.”

“We’re a data-driven organization. It’s why US aviation has been so incredibly safe and frankly why aviation has been safe around the world,” said Elwell.

The FAA official added: “You have to establish at least more than a gut feeling that two crashes are related before you ground an entire fleet.”

Elwell said the US and Canada, which also halted flights of the 737 MAX planes Wednesday, “made our decisions based on new data and the data is what drove it.”

“I really don’t know what drove the decisions of the other countries,” he said.

Aviation experts have said issues with the newly installed automated system on the 737 MAX planes called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, also known as MCAS, may have played a role in both the Ethiopian Airlines crash and the Lion Air crash.

When “Today” host Savannah Guthrie asked Elwell about reports that pilots have not been properly trained in the MCAS system, he said, “Well, the MCAS system is explained in the manuals.”

“When the accident occurred in Ethiopia we did a scrub of all of the technical data that we collected, that we gathered…and there was not a single incident in our examination of this MCAS system being activated or pilots having to work with it or deal with it. So it has not — in the US and with our pilots in the MAX — it has not been an issue.”

When asked about President Trump’s tweet earlier this week that “airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly,” Elwell said, “Planes are far more complex – he’s right about that.”

“I think most aviation experts will tell you that since we have automated aircraft, since the dawn of automation, safety has improved dramatically and while they are more complex they are definitely safer,” said Elwell.

With Post Wires