Six minutes to disaster: How Ethiopian Air's pilots battled Boeing 737 Max
The alarms started sounding just seconds after Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 took off on March 10 from Addis Ababa with 157 people on board.
As speed and altitude readings started going haywire, a device known as a stick shaker activated on the left side of the cockpit, where the captain sits. The mechanism makes a loud noise and rattles a pilot’s control column to warn of an impending aerodynamic stall.
But the Boeing Co. 737 Max wasn’t about to stall. Instead, a computer was getting erroneous readings from a sensor mounted like a weather vane on the jet’s nose. The malfunction triggered an anti-stall feature that forced the plane into a dive -- the same system that was implicated in a crash less than five months before in Indonesia that killed 189 people.
To counteract it, the Ethiopian Airlines pilots responded with at least some of the steps that Boeing and the US Federal Aviation Administration recommended after the first accident. But amid a chorus of confusing alarms, they also made a critical oversight as they struggled for control, according to three pilots with experience in accident investigations: They left the engines set nearly to maximum.
“The thrust was full bore the whole way,” said Roger Cox, a former accident investigator at the National Transportation Safety Board, who flew earlier models of the 737 while working as an airline pilot. “That is extremely curious.”
Ethiopian Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges said in a press conference Thursday that the pilots followed proper procedures issued after the October crash of a Lion Air jet. She recommended that Boeing review its flight-control system. Aviation authorities should verify that the issues have been adequately addressed “before the release of the aircraft to operations,” she said.
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