Safety failure blamed for Boeing crash

ADDIS ABABA — The crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737-8 Max airplane in 2019 that killed 157 people was caused by a faulty safety feature, Ethiopian authorities have said in the final report.

On March 10, 2019, the aircraft flying from Addis Ababa to Nairobi crashed a few minutes after takeoff, eventually killing all passengers and crew on board.

It came just months after the October 2018 crash of a 737 MAX operated by Lion Air in Indonesia, which killed 189 people when it crashed moments after leaving Jakarta airport.

Both accidents saw uncontrolled drops in the aircraft's nose in the moments before the planes crashed, which investigators have blamed on the model's anti-stall flight system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS.

A final report on the accident concluded that nothing was wrong before takeoff, and the crash was due to a safety feature failure, said Dagmawit Moges, Ethiopian minister of transport and logistics.

"The airplane's Left Angle of Attack (AOA) sensor failed immediately after takeoff, sending faulty data to the flight control system," Moges was quoted by the Ethiopian News Agency as saying on Friday. "The erroneous data in turn triggered the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which repeatedly pitched the nose of the plane down to the point the pilots lost control."

The AOA sensors on the aircraft tell the MCAS to automatically point the nose of the plane down if it is in danger of going into a stall. It was learned that the MCAS is an automated safety feature on the 737 Max 8 designed to prevent the plane from entering into a stall, or losing lift.

The accident prompted Ethiopia's flag carrier, along with many other airlines worldwide, to ground Boeing 737 MAX jets.

In February the Ethiopian flag carrier flew a Boeing 737 MAX jet for the first time since the accident.

After the crashes, delivery and production of the 737 MAX were suspended and all existing aircraft were grounded for 20 months, before being gradually allowed to fly again in late 2020 after Boeing made the necessary corrections.

In January last year, Boeing agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle a US criminal charge over claims that the company defrauded regulators overseeing the 737 MAX.

In September US securities officials fined Boeing $200 million over the company's misleading assurances about the safety of the 737 MAX airplane following the two deadly crashes.

Agencies - Xinhua