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Lion Air families told 737 MAX design flaws linked to deadly crash

Lion Air families told 737 MAX design flaws linked to deadly crash
By Jessica Damiana and Bernadette Christina Munthe

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Mechanical and design issues contributed to the crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX jet last October, Indonesian investigators told victims’ families in a briefing on Wednesday ahead of the release of a final report.

Contributing factors to the crash of the new Boeing jet, which killed all 189 on board, included incorrect assumptions on how an anti-stall device called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) functioned and how pilots would react, slides in the presentation showed.

The briefing slides showed that a lack of documentation about how systems would behave in a crash scenario, including the activation of a “stick shaker” device that warned pilots of a dangerous loss of lift, also contributed.

“Deficiencies” in the flight crew’s communication and manual control of the aircraft contributed as well, the slides showed, as did alerts and distractions in the cockpit.

The deficiencies had been “identified during training,” the slides said, without elaborating.

Reliance on a single angle-of-attack sensor made MCAS more vulnerable to failure, while the sensor on the plane that crashed had been miscalibrated during an earlier repair, according to the slides.

The final report will be released on Friday.

Some relatives of the victims at the briefing in Jakarta expressed disappointment that direct responsibility wasn’t assigned.

“Why isn’t the airline heavily sanctioned?” said Anton Sahadi, 30, whose relatives Riyan Aryandi and Muhammad Rafi Andrian were killed in the crash. “This isn’t about one or two lives, it’s about 189 lives.”

The role of the civil investigators is not to assign blame but to draw lessons that will make flying safer. Separate court actions will address who is legally responsible for the crash.

Ony Soerjo Wibowo, an investigator with Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) who delivered the briefing, declined to comment afterward. An agency representative also declined to comment.

A representative for Lion Air declined to comment.

A Boeing spokeswoman declined to comment on the briefing, saying: “As the report hasn’t been officially released by the authorities, it is premature for us to comment on its contents.”

The 737 MAX was grounded worldwide after a second deadly crash in Ethiopia in March 2019.

Planemaker Boeing is under growing pressure to explain what it knew about 737 MAX problems before the aircraft entered service.

Boeing has already said it would redesign the MCAS anti-stall system to rely on more than a single sensor and to help reduce pilot workload.

The planemaker is set to release third-quarter financial results on Wednesday.

LION AIR FLIGHT

Contact with Lion Air flight 610 was lost 13 minutes after it took off on Oct. 29 from the capital, Jakarta, heading north to the tin-mining town of Pangkal Pinang.

The Boeing 737 MAX airplane had suffered a sequence of problems in cockpit readings since Oct. 26, culminating in a decision to change the angle-of-attack sensor before the penultimate flight from Denpasar to Jakarta.

During the fatal night-time flight, a “stick shaker” was vibrating the captain’s controls, warning of a stall throughout most of the 13 minutes aloft, based on what investigators believe to have been erroneous data on the attitude of the wings relative to the direction of flight, called the angle of attack.

The angle must be controlled so that the aircraft’s wings maintain lift and avoid stalling, a condition in which a plane will begin to fall out of the sky.

The airplane’s anti-stall system repeatedly pushed the nose of the aircraft down, which is how pilots usually get air under the wings.

Boeing was widely criticized for placing emphasis on piloting and maintenance issues in its public response to an earlier report, sparking a furious dispute with Lion Air co-founder Rusdi Kirana.

The planemaker has since acknowledged that MCAS and a faulty angle of attack sensor played a role, and apologized for lives lost without admitting formal responsibility.

Boeing last month settled the first claims stemming from the Lion Air crash, a U.S. plaintiffs’ lawyer said.

Three other sources told Reuters the families of those killed will receive at least $1.2 million each.

The manufacturer faces nearly 100 lawsuits over the Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10, which killed all 157 people on board the flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi.

The 737 MAX was grounded following the second crash, leaving Boeing and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grappling to contain a crisis that has left 346 people dead, forced airlines to ground more than 300 aircraft, and put Boeing deliveries worth more than $500 billion on hold.

Boeing on Tuesday ousted the top executive of its commercial airplanes division, Kevin McAllister, marking the first high-level departure from the planemaker since two fatal crashes.

(Reporting by Jessica Damiana and Bernadette Christina Munthe; Additional reporting by Jakarta bureau and Tim Hepher; writing by Gerry Doyle; editing by Himani Sarkar and Jason Neely)

Tearful relatives of Indonesia jet crash victims demand answers

A man, who had family on the crashed Lion Air flight JT610, cries as he attends a news conference about the recovery process at a hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, November 5, 2018. REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan

By Cindy Silviana and Augustinus Beo Da Costa

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Relatives of the victims of an Indonesian jet that crashed into the sea off Jakarta last week killing all 189 on board demanded answers on Monday as to why the plane had been passed fit to fly and called for no let up in the search for loved ones.

Indonesian authorities on Sunday extended by three days the search for victims and a second black box recorder from wreckage of a nearly new Boeing Co. 737 MAX that slammed into the sea a week ago only minutes after it took off from Jakarta.

At a news conference charged with emotion, relatives addressed questions to Indonesian officials including transport minister Budi Karya Sumadi and the head of the country’s transportation safety committee (KNKT).

“We are the victims here. Imagine if you were in our position,” said Najib Fuquoni, a relative of a victim, demanding an independent investigation into the crash.

Muhammad Bambang Sukandar, the father of another victim, said Lion Air technicians needed to take “full responsibility” if it was proved they had not properly attended to technical issues following the jet’s previous flight from Bali to Jakarta.

“This is not an unimportant thing. These are people’s lives,” he said, as he sought to choke back tears.

“Don’t let something like this keep happening in Indonesia,” he added.

Indonesia is one of the world’s fastest-growing aviation markets, but its safety record has been patchy. Its transport safety panel investigated 137 serious aviation incidents from 2012 to 2017.

At one stage during Monday’s news conference, relatives urged Lion Air founder Rusdi Kirana, who was in the audience, to stand up. He stood up, but did not comment and clasped his hands together as if seeking forgiveness.

The privately owned budget carrier was founded in 1999. Its aircraft have been involved in at least 15 safety incidents and it has been placed under tougher international safety restrictions than other Indonesian airlines.

While victims’ relatives are desperate to know what happened, the first crash of a Boeing 737 MAX is also the focus of scrutiny by the global aviation industry.

“As an initial step we conducted ramp checks for 11 Boeing 737 Max 8,” said transport minister Sumadi, adding that authorities were also conducting a special audit to include operating procedures and crew qualifications.

The search effort has involved 151 divers, five helicopters, 61 ships, ranging from fishing boats to ships with advanced sonar scanners, as well as underwater drones.

An Indonesian rescue diver died during the search for a second black box, parts of the plane, and human remains on the muddy seabed.

The head of KNKT Surjanto Tjahjono has said 69 hours of recorded data from 19 flights, including the one that crashed, had been downloaded successfully from a partly damaged flight data recorder recovered on Thursday.

As of Monday, 138 body bags containing human remains had been recovered and handed to police for forensic identification, yet only 14 victims had been identified.

Among the larger parts of the plane found have been a mangled engine and a damaged aircraft wheel.

Tjahjono said based on initial analysis the “engine was running with fairly high speed” when it hit the water.

While there were no signs of an explosion in the air, the plane appeared to have hit the water with huge force, he said.

“When the plane hit the water, the energy released was extraordinarily large.”

(This story has been refiled to correct to “last week” in first paragraph, not “this week”)

(Writing by Ed Davies; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)