Your assumption is that The cause was the plane, but neither Ethiopian nor Lion Air have great safety records in the first place. Parent’s point is that the FAA is likely to be more aware of whether the cause in the first crash was due to the plane, pilot error, weather, or any number of other factors.
[edit] Apparently I’m incorrect about their safety records - my bad, the one time I trusted a friend and didn’t look into it myself, haha. I still maintain that it isn’t clear yet that it was the plane’s design, but I retract my comments on the safety record. Carry on and please quit the downvoting heh. :)
> At the same time, I don't know anyone working in aviation who thinks it's 100% a coincidence that the first crashes happened with those two airlines. There are always multiple factors in play.
I don't know much about Lion Air, but Ethiopian is considered a good airline. IT actually does a lot of training and maintenance for several major airlines in Africa. Their crews tend to be young, but that is because they are rapidly growing.
It lists no fewer than 89 findings about the causes that lead to that crash and 25 recommendations for how to make sure it doesn't happen again. The industry culture that makes such reports possible, makes them public, and takes them very seriously is why I would feel safe flying on a 737 MAX tomorrow. Because I have very good, very well supported, evidence that it would be safe to do so.
We don't yet have a final report on the Ethiopian Airlines mishap, and the investigation process has been a little more political that what we saw with Indonesia, but the preliminary reports and analyses point to a similar complexity of causes, and will undoubtedly generate a similarly thorough and useful set of recommendations.
The training hours should also be looked in the context of the total hours flown on that specific model - a pilot who just sat through the short training session would have a different perspective than a pilot who sat through the same training session but has also flown the plane for hundreds of hours.
It's also not a brand new airplane - it's a modification of 737, so the training is transitional. It's not like Boeing took a freshly minted Cessna 152 pilot, gave them a 2-hour seminar, and type-rated them for the 737 Max.
Except none of their pilots crashed the plane despite flying an order of magnitude more flights than Ethiopian or Lion Air. The difference is that US pilots are far better trained and maintenance doesn’t skimp like Lion Air had a long history of doing. The Lion Air plane should have been grounded when the the AOA sensor was reported bad on the flight the day before the crash. The executive in charge of Lion Air maintenance should be in jail: they let the plane fly knowing the AOA sensor was faulty. The MEL for that airplane required the AOA sensor. For some reason we let Lion Air off the hook, but look at their history: one of the most dangerous airlines in existence and that isn’t Boeing’s fault.
You can see the previous flight made by the same lion air plane that crashed here[1]. They not only did not declare an emergency but they contained the flight as normal and flew for over an hour with no MCAS and no electric trim.
I should point out they found the stab cut out procedure by trial and error and were able to maintain control of the plane simply by counteracting the errant downward trim. The reason the Ethiopian plane crashed is that they didn't execute the airspeed disagree procedure and left the throttles on basically maximum.
Yes MCAS is an issue, But since no one on this site has gotten this right I might as well point that out
Firstly, let's note that the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines crash has not yet been determined.
In the case of the Lion Air crash, the problem was not that the crew were unaware of the airplane's attitude (it was daylight in good weather, and they also had functioning airspeed indicators), it was that the control system kept resetting the longitudinal trim incorrectly in response to a faulty angle-of-attack sensor, and the crew did not follow the procedure to disable it from doing so.
That has not been glossed over at all, people bring it up all the time, especially in reference to Lion Air. But it's not a unifying factor in the two cases. Ethiopian Airlines has a very good safety track record and I have not seen it reported that they operate with more inexperienced pilots than elsewhere.
They followed Boeing's checklist in one of the two, and still crashed. Boeing's checklist doesn't account for high aerodynamic loads on the horizontal stabilizer making manual trim adjustment difficult to impractical.
Ethiopian is an interesting crash because they followed Boeing's procedure, were still in imminent danger, and then had to diverge from procedure (i.e. re-enable electronic trim to electronic adjust) but that only worsened the problem since MCAS's five second delay had elapsed.
I'd hope we're well passed blaming pilots for this one. Even Lion Air's maintenance team might deserve a little slack, as the MCAS system kept on switching between faulty AoA sensor and working one every time the aircraft was restarted, meaning the maintenance team might not have been able to reproduce the issue.
And the author slightly joins on on that with his off-the-cuff characterization of the two 737 Max 8 crashes (at Lion Air and Ethiopian) as
>two preventable crashes at unready airlines in developing countries
Ethiopian is a large and by all accounts modern and well-run airline which has been operating jets since the early 1960s, and performs maintenance for other airlines. While it was originally set up as essentially a branch of TWA with American staff, it hasn't relied on foreign staff since the 70s. It's been an early adopter of new Boeing aircraft since the early 80s (with the 767) and was the first airline outside Japan to fly the 787 commercially.
It seems like there's a never ending barrage of 'news' around this. All of this is speculation at this point though. Investigation takes time, which is almost unusual in a time of minute by minute updates on absolutely everything.
I would not be surprised if the cause ends up being more complicated than the currently suggested causes. There's definitely a lot to suggest that the cause of the Ethiopian and Lion Air crashes is the same, but the current explanation seems overly simplistic.
The failure modes in the leading theory for the Lion Air crash were a broken AOA sensor causing the MCAS to kick in erroneously, combined with the pilots not reacting properly to a runaway trim situation. From what I understand, while MCAS is new, the process for reacting to runaway trim is not new to the 737 Max. This is probably also why the FAA and airlines like Southwest were confident their pilots would handle this situation correctly.
For the cause of the Ethiopian crash to be the same, the pilots would also need to be unfamiliar with the runaway trim process. This seems unlikely though after the Lion Air crash since it put so much attention on that scenario. That suggests to me there might at least be other contributing factors to both these crashes. I think we just need to wait and see what the investigations of both these crashes find.
I was too harsh on Ethiopian. I was being too eager to bash out a "hot take" on my phone. So, I withdraw my characterisation of them as terrible.
While Ethiopian's safety record isn't terrible, Lion Air's was/is, despite attempts to change matters. Ethiopian do have a number of ongoing issues though, and Ethopian Airlines, the ECAA, and the EAIB have some troubling tendencies to avoid introspection - perhaps since Ethiopian Airlines is a government-owned flag carrier. Consider their response [0] to the LCAA/NTSB/BEA's investigation of the Flight 409 crash: "biased, lacking evidence, incomplete and did not present the full account of the accident [..] Any characterization of our pilots contrary to the foregoing is pure fabrication that cannot stand any scrutiny". That being said, I would personally fly on Ethiopian, but I definitely have reservations about them.
With regard to both crashes, the NTSB/BEA/EAIB reports all identify crew performance as inadequate. The counter-argument is that since they hadn't seen this specific situation before, their inappropriate responses were due to a loss of situational awareness and task saturation, especially with the AOA causing an erroneous stick shaker and various confusing instrument readings. That said, in both cases, the weather was good and it was daytime, so the pilot responses are nevertheless surprising even given the erroneous instrumentation.
While it's true that MCAS doesn't resemble the most common causes of runaway trim, runaway trim can happen for lots of reasons, and not all present the same way. For example, intermittent shorts can cause rapid intermittent uncommanded trimming. In any case, the response is the same, which (paraphrased) are the memory items: disengage and do not re-engage the autopilot, disengage and do not re-engage the autothrottle, hit the trim cutout switches, hold the trim wheel, and trim manually, then follow the more detailed written procedures. Indeed, in previous flights on the Lion Air aircraft, MCAS issues had occurred and the pilots in those flights recovered using the runaway stabilizer procedure.
The reason they are memory items is because trim runaway can happen FAST and recovering a severely out-of-trim aircraft using the trim wheel is somewhere between difficult and impossible, even with light aircraft, so if the trim is ever doing something unexpected, the first instinct should be to disable AP and then stab trim cutout. The responses from the pilots in both crashes were not to do this, and indeed what they did do was strange and suggests poor CRM and insufficient training. Additionally, with Ethiopian, they hadn't properly disseminated Boeing's updated MCAS training to their pilots following the Lion Air crash.
I'm not trying to defend Boeing, as they massively fucked up, but my point is really that airline training and safety practices are very important, and for me personally, far outweigh the aircraft I'd be flying in (unless BA were trying to get me on a Tupolev). I'm also not American and have long preferred Airbus to Boeing, so I'm not saying any of this because I'm biased in favour of the US. The FAA also clearly hold some of the bag here for not properly regulating Boeing.
There's a major difference between the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes though - altitude and incident duration. Things that are recoverable from 5000' AGL might not be from 1000' AGL. Speed is life, and altitude is life insurance after all.
From my reading, the Lion Air pilots could have disabled electronic trim anytime after those 26 recoveries and been fine. But the Ethiopian Airlines pilots only had 1000' of altitude to recover in, and that wasn't enough. Which leads to the question of why MCAS was triggering at 1000' AGL, since it isn't supposed to activate when flaps are deployed... I don't think MCAS is going to end up being the sole hardware issue on that flight.
The recent crash is by Ethiopian Arilines. NOT Lion Air.
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