Boeing issues advice over sensors after Indonesia crash

— Boeing issued a special bulletin Wednesday addressing a sensor problem flagged by Indonesian safety officials investigating the crash of a Lion Air 737 that killed 189 people last week.

The plane maker said local aviation officials believed pilots might have been given wrong information by the plane’s automated systems before the fatal crash.

“The Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee has indicated that Lion Air flight 610 experi- enced erroneous input from one of its AOA (Angle of Attack) sensors,” Boeing said.

“Boeing issued an Operations Manual Bulletin (OMB) directing operators to existing flight crew procedures to address circumstances where there is erroneous input from an AOA sensor.”

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued an order to domestic carriers to follow the new instructions on dealing with the erroneous sensor alert in 737-8 and -9 airplanes.

This affects nearly 250 aircraft flown by U.S. airlines like Southwest, American and United, the FAA said.

The FAA emergency directive warns that the “erroneous inputs can potentially make the horizontal stabilizers repeatedly pitch the nose of the airplane downward, making the aircraft difficult to control.”

An AOA sensor provides data about the angle at which wind is passing over the wings and tells pilots how much lift a plane is getting. The information can be critical in preventing the plane from stalling.

Lion Air JT610 plunged into the Java Sea less than half an hour after taking off from Jakarta on a routine flight to Pangkal Pinang city. There were no survivors.

The doomed jet was a Boeing 737-Max 8, one of the world’s newest and most advanced commercial passenger planes, and there is still no answer as to what caused the crash. A preliminary report is expected at the end of the month.