Displaying items by tag: Indonesia

Multiple sources are reporting that Ethiopian Airlines flight  302 from Addis Ababa, crashed Sunday morning killing everyone on board. It was just six minutes into its flight and investigators are currently searching for the black box and have only just begun to unravel the tragedy. But what we do know is that this is the second time in the last few months that a Boeing 737 MAX 8 has gone down within minutes of takeoff.

Last year, Lion Air Flight JT610 out of Indonesia went down a few minutes after takeoff killing all 189 on board. That black box was found and investigators determined that the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) was suspected to have caused the crash. To my understanding the MCAS is a, “automatic feature that detects if the nose of the plane is pitched up too high and pushes it down to prevent the craft from stalling.”

And sounds as if, if the MCAS malfunctions then it believes the plane is rising to quickly and, in order to avoid an engine stall, forces the plane to push down into a nose dive. Which means the pilots of the Indonesian flight desperately fought the nose dive. In fact, the crash investigation found that the pilots attempted to raise the nose of the aircraft more than 20 times in 11 minute flight before they crashed into the sea approx. 13 minutes into their flight.

What we don’t know is if the two crashes have anything in common other than the fact that they were both the same model of plane but it’s certainly something to be aware of. The model in question, the Boeing 737 MAX has only been out for a few years. As of now investigators are treating it as “coincidence” that both recent crashes had the exact same model and have gone down within minutes of take off but, I’m sure that they will be looking into similarities.

Boeing, of course, immediately entered damage control mode and released a carefully worded “Boeing is deeply saddened by the passing of the passengers and crew of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 …”

Did you catch that? The “passing” of the passengers and crew? That kind of pisses me off. The passengers didn’t peacefully “pass” in their sleep, no - they died a terrifying & horrible death and it might be because your (Boeing) brand new planes are not safe.

It’s too early into the investigation to know exactly why the plane crashed but, to be honest, if you heard that two of the exact same plane model have crashed under similar circumstances - would you buy a ticket on that plane? Because I certainly won’t.

This is a developing story.