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The Crash
The Crash
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 was a scheduled flight from Ethiopia to Kenya. On March 10, 2019 the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft crashed six minutes into takeoff, killing all 157 people aboard.
Upon takeoff, the pilots reported a flight control problem to the control tower. The MCAS system activated, pitching the plane's nose down into a dive. The pilots followed procedure and disabled the electrical trim tab system along with MCAS software. However, this shut off their ability to trim the stabilizer electrically. The pilots had inadvertently left the engines on full takeoff power which made it impossible for the pilots to manually adjust the stabilizer. In a last ditch effort to save the plane, the pilots turned back on the electrical system to shift the stabilizer. However, this reactivated the MCAS system, pushing the airplane down into the ground.
The Investigation and Aftermath
The Investigation and Aftermath
Preliminary reports found that the pilots had followed Boeing procedures to deal with an MCAS failure. Immediately, Ethiopian Airlines grounded the aircraft as well as other operators. the Civil Aviation Administration of China grounded the 737 Max 8 on March 11, 2019. The FAA declined to ground the plane, instead stating that Boeing had assured its airworthiness but later issued an emergency grounding order on March 13 after Canada stated it had indisputable evidence that the MCAS system was involved again.
Boeing and other media outlets have blamed the pilots' incompetence for the crashes. In official statements released after the crash, Boeing has stated that pilots were trained to deal with a similar situation to the MCAS sensor failure known as runaway trim, where the horizontal stabilizer "runs away" and causes the plan to pitch up or down. The procedure to counter this is to give opposing elevator, shut off electronics, and resort to manual trim. In each crash, there were pilot errors (in the Java Sea crash, the pilots continually ignored the plane's error warnings and in the Ethiopian crash, the manual trim was locked by aerodynamic forces because the pilots had erroneously maintained takeoff speed). It has made plans to change the software to enhance the safety of its aircraft.
Image Sources:1) via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302 2) via https://time.com/5548737/second-boeing-crash-737-max-8/
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