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It took the deaths of 346 people to shed light on the failures of the US aircraft manufacturer and the licensing authority. Since then, Boeing has not recovered from the forced shutdown of the 737 MAX.
On October 19, 2018, there was a strange accident in Indonesia. The domestic Lion Air 610 flight departed from the capital, Jakarta Airport, to Pangkal Pinang with 181 passengers and eight crew members on board. The airline wanted to cover this distance with a new Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane, which was launched just 3 months ago, but the plane crashed into the Java Sea 13 minutes after takeoff. No one survived the disaster.
A few months later, an eerily similar accident occurred with the same guy. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 departed on March 10, 2019 from Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya, with 149 passengers and eight crew members on board. The plane, which was only four months old, crashed to the ground six minutes after takeoff, killing all of its passengers.
In the accidents in which a total of 346 people were killed, it was not just the type of plane and what they had in common that they had done with just a few months of planes, but that they had become unmanageable before crashing. Based on last minute audio recordings the pilots struggled to somehow lift the nose of the plane, which was pushed down by the automatic control system (MCAS). Otherwise, the latter would have been tasked with changing the angle of the horizontal guide planes to prevent the machine from falling in an emergency, but in both cases the system received an erroneous signal that could not be subsequently corrected.
There were already problems with the design.
The Boeing 737 MAX 8 model took off for the first time in January 2016 and entered service in 2017. It was the latest generation of the 737 family, in which the American factory had high hopes. The orders also came in very well: By February 2019, 376 pieces had already been produced. Although it was suspected after the Lion Air disaster that the accident was caused by a design flaw, and the United States Aviation Authority (FAA) asked Boeing to repair it, the circulating aircraft was forced to land alone. after the tragedy in Ethiopia.
Investigations revealed that Boeing management was aware of the design flaw, but despite warnings from staff, did nothing to correct it. However, the responsibility of the inspection and approval authority may also arise in the case, as the FAA has increasingly consulted these things with Boeing engineers. The process was constantly being pushed, so security considerations took a backseat.
Yet Boeing paid a huge price for all of this. Airlines canceled more orders after the disasters than the company produced during that time. The company’s operating profit went from a profit of $ 4.1 billion in 2018 to a loss of $ 2.2 billion last year. Since then, Boeing has fixed the software bugs, therefore MCAS now sends out a signal based on multiple incoming data that pilots can compensate for, but it is a question of when it will be approved by the FAA. Only possible next year.
As you can see, the two tragedies had far-reaching consequences. It turns out that safety regulations, often time-consuming procedures, can only be overridden for business interests from time to time. Although Boeing has not gone bankrupt, its global competitor Airbus has now gained a significant advantage. It also turned out that this time no human errors were made in the cabin, although it no longer comforts the victims and their loved ones.
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