Brand new Boeing 737 crashes - David Pate

Two Boeing MAX 8s have crashed in less than six months. The Lion Air flight from October had 189 souls on-board and the Ethiopian Air flight had 157 souls on-board, in both instances, all passengers were killed and both planes were in the air for less than 15 minutes before a catastrophic malfunction occurred. Striking similarities happened between the two flights at the time of the malfunction, Lion Air experienced wild fluctuations in altitude and the Ethiopian flight also experienced altitude variations prior to crashing, although not as erratic as the Lion Air flight. It was determined that a module called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System on the plane belonging to Lion Air was malfunctioning. This system works like the automatic braking feature in some new vehicles. If live data suggests the plane is at risk of stalling during assent, the nose downward will adjust automatically. Since the plane wasn't at risk, the pilots chose to fight the system. I'm all for fighting the power, but in this case, almost 200 lives were in their hands. Boeing released a statement saying that this system can be turned off by the pilots. They also sent an emergency bulletin out to all airlines making sure their pilots are trained to shut the module down in case of malfunction. It's too early to know for sure if the same thing happened with the Ethiopian plane, but time will tell when data is retrieved from the flight recorder.

Written by David Pate

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/10/africa/ethiopian-airlines-crash-boeing-max-8-intl/index.html