China airlines association estimates losses from 737 MAX grounding at $579 million

The China Air Transport Association (CATA) on Friday said it expects losses at Chinese airlines caused by the grounding of Boeing Co's 737 MAX aircraft to be around 4 billion yuan ($579.32 million) by the end of June.

CATA in a statement on its website said it hopes Boeing will attach great importance to compensation requests made by Chinese airlines.

Boeing in early May admitted that a key alert system linked to faulty sensors was sold as an optional feature on Boeing 737 MAX planes. Later, on May 17, it had issued a statement of 'fixing' the problem.

Boeing has been under pressure and facing heat, following the crash of Lion Air Flight JT610 and Ethopian Airlines ET302, which killed 189 onboard passengers and 149 passengers respectively. After these two deadly crashes, it was decided to ground the aircraft worldwide. 

(With inputs from Reuters)