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Pilots overwhelmed when safety system forced plane鈥檚 nose down
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Faulty equipment and Indonesian carrier Lion Air鈥檚 own safety failures had pilots fighting for control of their Boeing 737 MAX 8 as it plunged into the Java Sea on October 28, killing all 189 people aboard investigators said yesterday.
Briefing reporters on the aircraft鈥檚 black box data, investigators cited multiple factors centered on faulty sensors and an automatic safety system that repeatedly forced the plane鈥檚 nose down despite the pilots鈥 efforts to correct the problem.
Based on the slew of problems with the aircraft beforehand, they suggested the jet should not have been in service.
The National Transportation Safety Commission鈥檚 Nurcahyo Utomo said investigators were trying to figure out from interviews with engineers why they certified the Boeing 737 as airworthy.
鈥淲e need to compare the statements of the engineers with the required procedures,鈥 Utomo said.
Once the jet was airborne, the pilots appeared to have been overwhelmed, said another of the crash investigators, Ony Suryo Wibowo.
鈥淭he problem is if multiple malfunctions occur all at once, which one should be prioritized?鈥 Wibowo said.
The MAX aircraft that crashed is the latest version of Boeing's popular 737 jetliner. Its new automated system pushes the nose down if a sensor detects that the nose is pointed so high that the plane could go into an aerodynamic stall.
The sensor, called an angle-of-attack vane, or AOA, malfunctioned in earlier flights.
Pilots who flew the aircraft from Bali to Jakarta a day before the crash told investigators that the anti-stall system engaged due to erroneous airspeed and altitude indicators, but the flight crew managed to adjust the plane鈥檚 pitch manually by shutting the automated system off.
Exactly what technicians did to try to fix the problems and if there were other steps that should have been taken given that four of the crashed aircraft鈥檚 six previous flights had experienced technical problems are being investigated.
Boeing played up the possibility of pilot error.
鈥淎s our customers and their passengers continue to fly the 737 MAX to hundreds of destinations around the world every day, they have our assurance that the 737 MAX is as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies,鈥 it said.
Peter Lemme, an expert in aviation and satellite communications and a former Boeing engineer who wrote an analysis of the data on his blog, likened the problems to 鈥渁 deadly game of tag鈥 in which the plane pointed down, the pilots countered by manually aiming the nose higher, only for the sequence to repeat about five seconds later.
鈥淗ad they fixed the airplane, we would not have had the accident,鈥 he said.
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