Has an airliner been grounded before this?

The worldwide grounding of a new aircraft type is a very rare occurrence. Most recently the Boeing 787 was grounded due to battery issues for three months in 2013, an episode that cost the manufacturer dearly in the short-term.

Previously, Airbus suffered two crashes of the then revolutionary A320 in June 1988 and February 1990. As a result of the second accident, India’s regulator (the crash involved an Indian Airlines aircraft in Bangalore) grounded the fleet in that country. But other regulators declined to follow suit, despite claims by some pilots that the aircraft’s fly-by-wire control system was fundamentally flawed. Several changes were made to the A-320 systems after that accident and the aircraft has been a bestseller for Airbus ever since. There have been other crashes of the type since then, but no fatal system error has been identified with the fly-by-wire system, with most being attributed to ‘pilot error’ or extraneous factors.