- ET-AVJ The Ethiopian Airlines plane involved
China has become the first country to ground all Boeing 737 Max 8 airliners after an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed just six minutes after take-off at the weekend killing all 157 passengers and crew onboard.
https://news.sky.com/story/ethiopia-crash-china-suspends-use-of-boeing-737-max-8-11661777
The crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 on Sunday morning just after take off from Addis Abbaba airport en route to Nairobi was the second such crash of this brand new model of jet in just six months.
Last October an almost identical Boeing 737 Max 8 operated by Lion Air went down over the Java sea in late October killing all 189 people on board. That crash also happened soon after take-off, and the FDR and CVR recorders when recovered indicated that the pilots had lost control of the aircraft after the auto-trim system in the flight control software system ran amok.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/10/africa/ethiopian-airlines-crash-boeing-max-8-intl/index.html
"It's highly suspicious," said Mary Schiavo, a CNN aviation analyst and the former Inspector General of the U.S. Transportation Department. "Here we have a brand-new aircraft that's gone down twice in a year. That rings alarm bells in the aviation industry, because that just doesn't happen."
Adding to concerns are some similarities between the two flights. Both were operated by well-known airlines with strong safety records.
At the root of October's Lion Air crash was a new safety system installed in the MAX 8 plane, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), that automatically pulls the plane's nose down if data suggests it is at risk.
In that flight, the system was responding to faulty data that suggested the nose was tilted at a higher angle than it was, indicating the plane was at risk of stalling.
The pilots subsequently engaged in a futile tug-of-war with the plane's automatic systems, trying to reverse a nosedive that should not be triggered so soon after takeoff. Boeing has argued that pilots should have identified the system was in operation, and turned it off.
"All pilots should have been trained on that function after Lion Air," Schiavo added. "Boeing did something very unusual for any manufacturer -- it sent out an emergency bulletin and told all airlines to make sure they trained the pilots in the shut-off procedure."
"This is one of the things that should never be happening after takeoff," Schiavo said.
Boeing and the US Federal Aviation Authority have so far refused to ground the Boeing 737 MAX 8 fleet citing its “stellar safety record”, but if the latest Ethiopian Airlines crash turns out to have been yet another disaster caused by a faulty AOA (angle of attack) sensor and a defective flight control software installation, then they will have little choice.
This is already reminiscent of the sad precedent of the de Havilland Comet jet airliner disasters of the 1950s when the Comet, the world’s first modern jet airliner had to be grounded after three of the brand new planes mysteriously disintegrated in mid-flight with the loss of all on board within less than a year.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140414-crashes-that-changed-plane-design
The fault in that instance turned out to be a structural weakness in the fuselage associated with the use of square-shaped window frames.
