Ethiopia Says Boeing Pilot Training for 737 Max Was Inadequate
Ethiopia Says Boeing Pilot Training for 737 Max Was Inadequate
Ethiopian investigators found Boeing Co.’s design of the 737 Max and inadequate pilot training led to a deadly crash a year ago, but dropped formal conclusions about the cause in an interim report after pressure from other nations.
A 136-page report, released by the country’s ministry of transport on Monday, said a safety feature known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System on the Ethiopian Airlines Group plane was central to why it crashed into a field near Addis Ababa on March 10 last year, killing all 157 people on board.
The once top-selling Max was grounded by global regulators days after the accident, plunging Boeing into a crisis. The crash followed a similarly deadly Lion Air Max jet wreck in Indonesia about four months earlier, which also featured the MCAS. Work to redesign the software and to address additional safety issues still isn’t complete and the U.S. manufacturer doesn’t expect the jet to return until summer at the earliest.
The interim crash report was issued a day before the anniversary of the crash. Memorial services are planned Tuesday at the crash site for family members of the victims as well as one in Addis Ababa.
A draft of the report had originally included a probable cause and contributing factors focusing on the plane’s design, said two people familiar with the situation who asked not to be named while discussing the sensitive matter. The interim report included six recommendations and 16 “findings,” several of which pointed at Boeing, but no formal conclusion of what caused the disaster.
Conclusions about the cause and any contributing factors would be included in a final report. Ethiopian authorities haven’t said when they expect to finish a such a report.
Boeing, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and the French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety all weighed in with concerns about how the original draft was written, said the people.
Helping to explain what the Ethiopian aviators were doing is key to gaining a full understanding as to what happened, yet the new report from the country’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau does little to address the pilots’ behavior.
The FAA alluded to that in a statement.
“We believe it’s important to have the full final report to evaluate it against other independent reports so that we might fully understand all of the factors -- both mechanical and human -- that played a role in this tragic loss of life,” the agency said.
The report’s conclusions focus on Boeing, including issues with MCAS, training and the plane’s reliance on only a single sensor.
“Boeing continues to provide technical assistance in support of the investigation,” a company spokesman said in an emailed statement. “We look forward to reviewing the full details and formal recommendations.”
The NTSB sent “general comments” on the interim report to Ethiopia on Thursday, said spokesman Eric Weiss, declining to specify what was said. The practice in international investigations is that NTSB represents Boeing’s and FAA’s views.
Outside input on accident probes is generally included in a final report, but not in an interim report such as what Ethiopia released.
Training requirements for the 737 Max were set by the FAA and Ethiopian authorities. Boeing had insisted that the Max was so similar to earlier models that only limited training was needed to move from one to the other, and made that a selling point for the plane.
The planemaker this year recommended that Max pilots get simulator training. The FAA hasn’t weighed in on the issue.
Physical Effort
In both the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air accidents, the Max jets were hit by a malfunction that triggered repeated, automated attempts to dive the plane. One new detail that emerges from the latest report is how much physical effort was required by the pilots to keep their plane from diving.
Because the MCAS had moved the wing at the tail at an angle that was pushing down the nose, the pilots were countering that by pulling back their control columns. For long periods, they were using a force of 90 pounds or more, according to flight data in the report.
Investigators recreated the accident on a 737 Max simulator in Ethiopia. After the pilots in the accident disabled MCAS, they had to turn two cockpit wheels to readjust the so-called trim, which would have made the plane easier to fly and reduced the enormous pressure they were using to keep the plane climbing.
However, as a result of the high speed and the unusual configuration of the plane at the time, pilots in the simulator were unable to turn the wheels, the investigation concluded.
Separate tests in a special Boeing simulator prompted similar conclusions, the report said.
During the emergency, copilot Ahmed Nur Mohammod, in an apparent reference to his attempts to turn the wheel, said “it is not working.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Alan Levin in Washington at alevin24@bloomberg.net;Samuel Gebre in Addis Ababa at sgebre@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Palazzo at apalazzo@bloomberg.net, ;Jon Morgan at jmorgan97@bloomberg.net, John Bowker, David Malingha
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.