Ethiopian Airlines pilots have followed Boeing's emergency procedures before a crash: report



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Lion Air Flight 610 crashed into the Java Sea in Indonesia on October 29, after taking off from Jakarta. The 189 people on board are dead.

Following the accident in Lion Air, Boeing issued an "Operations Manual Bulletin" advising air operators how to address badpit reading errors. He told the airlines "that they follow the flight crew procedures in place to take into account the erroneous information provided by an AOA (angle of attack) sensor," said a Boeing statement.

If confirmed, findings published in the Wall Street Journal suggest that the emergency procedures described in the Boeing manual may not be enough to prevent an accident.

The findings are from a preliminary report which, according to the investigating authority, must be submitted within 30 days of an incident. The findings are not final and are subject to change as the investigation continues.

Other preliminary findings from data extracted from the Ethiopian Airlines black box suggest that the flight control function, called the Maneuvering Increasing System (MCAS), is activated automatically prior to the accident.

The MCAS is a system that automatically lowers the nose of the aircraft when it receives information from its external attack angle sensors (AOA) indicating that the aircraft is flying too far slowly or too strongly and may stall.

In the Lion Air accident, the MCAS forced the aircraft to nose down more than 24 times before hitting the water, according to a preliminary investigation by the Indonesian Committee on Transportation Safety, which had also discovered that the system was responding to a faulty sensor.

US pilots flying the Boeing 737 Max have also reported complaints about the aircraft's flight behavior, according to a federal database consulted by CNN.

The investigators indicated whether the pilots had sufficient training with the system.

According to Ethiopian Airlines General Manager Tewolde GebreMariam, pilots flying from the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft to older 737 aircraft were only required to complete a short-form computer training program prescribed by Boeing and approved by the FAA.

GebreMariam also stated that the flight simulator on which the pilots had been trained to learn to fly a Boeing 737 Max 8 did not reproduce the automated MCAS function studied by the accident investigators.

Spokespeople for the Southwest and American pilots unions said that the self-administered course – which one pilot told CNN that he was using on his iPad – had highlighted the differences between the Max 8 and older 737 models, but without explaining the MCAS functionality.

Boeing said that he was working on a hot fix for the 737 MAX jets but the FAA said

On Monday, the company concluded that "extra work" was needed.

"The FAA expects to receive Boeing's final version of its software enhancements in the coming weeks for approval by the FAA," the agency said in a statement. "It takes time for Boeing to perform additional work as a result of a continuous review of the 737 Max flight control system to ensure that Boeing has identified and appropriately addressed all issues. relevant. "

On Tuesday, a new Senate investigation was launched after reports of whistleblowers raised questions about whether FAA inspectors who tested the Boeing 737 MAX for certification were properly trained.

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