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ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – A preliminary report on "black boxes" recovered from an Ethiopian airliner has revealed similarities between this crash and another model using the same Boeing model in Indonesia five months earlier, announced on Sunday. Ethiopian Ministry of Transport.
Although a ministry spokesperson did not want to point out the similarities, the information contained in the black boxes, as well as the data loggers and voice recorders, suggest that the 302 flight of Ethiopian Airlines may have had problems similar to those of Lion Air Flight 610.
The two brand-new Boeing 737 Max 8s crashed shortly after take-off – Lion Air in October and Ethiopian Airlines last week – after unpredictable climbs that killed all pbadengers.
The revelation by the Ministry of Transport comes as a procession of empty coffins goes to a cemetery in Ethiopia. The crash of the airliner was so violent that people in mourning were left with few leftovers to bury. One hundred and fifty-seven people were killed in the disaster. (The Lion Air crash killed 189.)
The second accident resulted in the worldwide flight of Max Jet, Boeing's best-selling aircraft. Although US regulators have taken longer to anchor planes than other countries, they said last week that the physical evidence of the accident in Ethiopia, as well as the satellite tracking data, suggested similarities between the two accidents.
The investigators are also examining the information from the two flight recorders, whose data have been uploaded to France by airline investigators in recent days and sent to Ethiopians. Black boxes, which record sounds in the badpit and provide detailed information on items such as altitude and speed, are essential to help investigators reconstruct the crash course.
The US National Transportation Safety Board said in recent days that it would send a delegation to France, but on Sunday interrogated about the results of the black box, a spokesman for the agency said that only Ethiopian officials could communicate these results.
The terse announcement made in Ethiopia about early results is a new indication of potentially serious problems for Boeing.
Since the Indonesian crash, a suspicion of suspicion hangs not only on the jet, but also on the management of the deployment of Boeing. It only grew after the disaster in Ethiopia.
If the two accidents were to have a common cause, the company might have trouble explaining why it had left a very popular airplane continue to fly with a suspicious problem and why it had not acted more quickly to solve it. Security experts warn however that the findings at this stage of the investigation are far from certain.
On Sunday, in response to Ethiopian findings, Boeing issued a statement by its chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, saying the company "was working with the authorities to evaluate the new information as it becomes available."
"In accordance with the international protocol," he said, "all inquiries regarding the ongoing investigation into the accident should be directed to the investigating authorities." .
Launched in response to competitive pressure from Boeing's main rival, Airbus, the 737 Max design and build project was quickly pushed from the start.
Larger and repositioned engines have altered the aerodynamics of the Max compared to the previous generation 737. In order to solve the potential problems badociated with the new design, Boeing has added new software instead of rethinking the aircraft from zero.
Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration decided that pilots did not need to be aware of the new software, called MCAS.
And the plane was immediately popular with airlines. Boeing has delivered nearly 380 Max devices and has 4,600 additional orders.
But after the first accident, the company quickly found itself on the defensive.
When the 737 broke down in Indonesia and MCAS was implicated, Boeing repeatedly reiterated that the emergency procedures should have been enough for the pilots to save the gear if the system had malfunctioned. .
Even so, the company hastily informed pilots of MCAS – and then said that she was working on software changes. He promised to release them by the end of last year, according to the Southwest and American Airlines pilots.
But the hotfix has not yet taken place. Boeing now promises to publish the revisions in the coming weeks.
"While investigators continue to work to make definitive conclusions," says Boeing in his release, "the process of finalizing the development of a software update and a review of pilot training announced previously will address the behavior of the MCAS flight control law in response to the erroneous inputs of the sensors. "
Even before the Ethiopian announcement on Sunday, reported for the first time by the Wall Street Journal, publicly available data was accumulating that suggests the aircraft may have had problems with MCAS.
This system was installed in Max 8 aircraft to prevent stalls and works by forcing the nose of planes.
On the Indonesian flight, it is reported that the system acted due to erroneous readings of a sensor from the aircraft and that the pilots had trouble controlling the actions of the software. They eventually lost their fight and the plane plunged into the sea.
None of the public evidence regarding Ethiopian flight 302 is strong enough to prove that the system was active before the accident or that it forced the plane to descend.
Nevertheless, for the Ethiopian and Lion Air flights, public data seems to indicate repeated oscillations of 15 to 20 seconds – a possible indication that the pilots have overstepped the dive thrust of MCAS, and then reactivated it. . For Lion Air, these oscillations were then confirmed by the data of the flight recorders.
Debris from the site of the Ethiopian jet crash adds to suspicions that the MCAS system might have been involved.
An obscure part called a worm – the component that moves the stabilizers up and down the tail – was found and its configuration showed that the stabilizers had been tilted up, according to two people familiar with the recovery operations. This upward tilt of the outriggers is the mechanism used by MCAS to push the nose down.
The hotfix that Boeing is currently working on would change the functionality of the automated system that, according to the investigators, may have played a role in the Lion Air crash.
According to the investigators, during this accident, it appears that erroneous data from only one sensor could have triggered the automated system, thus pushing him to push the aircraft towards the ground.
The hotfix should ensure that the automated system relies on data from two sensors, instead of a single, more common method, according to several drivers and two lawmakers informed of the planned changes.
The changes should also slow down the rate at which the automated system pushes the nose, said Michael Michaelis, Senior Safety Officer at the American Airlines Pilots Union. And the update will also shut down the automated system if pilots seem to be fighting for control of the aircraft, the pilots said.
The changes implicitly imply that Boeing's automated system was defective.
The aircraft manufacturer, who wants to deliver the software update by April, said the hotfix "will make an already safe aircraft even safer."
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