Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee says there were flaws in Boeing's design of the anti-stall system and of its certification by American regulators
Boeing 737 MAX airplanes parked at Grant County International Airport in Moses Lake, Washington. File pic/AFP
Jakarta: A design flaw, inadequate pilot training and poor flight crew performance contributed to a Boeing jet crashing in Indonesia last year, killing all 189 people on board, investigators said on Friday.
The Lion Air disaster was followed months later by a second crash — involving the same model of aircraft — when an Ethiopian Airlines plane went down with 157 people aboard, leading to the global grounding of Boeing's entire 737 MAX fleet. The crashes had thrown a spotlight on the MAX model's Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), an anti-stall mechanism that pilots in both planes had struggled to control as the jets careered downwards.
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On Friday, Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee said there were flaws in Boeing's design of the anti-stall system and of its certification by US regulators. "The design and certification of this feature was inadequate," a summary of the report said, referring to the MCAS. The MCAS was vulnerable to a sole sensor that it relied on for inputs, and 737 MAX pilots were not properly briefed on how to handle a malfunction, it said.
"The aircraft flight manual and flight crew training did not include information about MCAS," the report said. A sensor on the doomed jet's system was "miscalibrated" and the problem was not caught by Lion Air maintenance crews, it said.
The report
. The MCAS was vulnerable to a sole sensor that it relied on for inputs, and 737 MAX pilots were not properly briefed on how to handle a malfunction
. The aircraft flight manual and flight crew training did not include information about MCAS
. The emergency was not "effectively managed" by the crew, who had previous performance issues
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