Max 8s could be grounded for months: Aviation chief
Boeing’s grounded 737 Max jets could be out of action for months until a software update can be tested and installed on all aircraft, the US aviation regulator said yesterday.
Dan Elwell, acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), said that at a minimum the planes would be forbidden to fly for weeks, although it could be longer after the second crash involving the new model in five months. Most other countries had already grounded the aircraft.
Elwell was briefing US congressmen as the two black boxes of the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board, arrived in Paris to be analysed. It could be anywhere between a few hours and several days results are released.
Suspicions that a new automated stabilisation system before the could be to blame grew after American experts studied details from the aircraft’s automatic data transmitter, received by satellite.
They showed a similarity between the Ethiopian Boeing’s six-minute flight and events leading to the crash of the Indonesian Lion Air Boeing of the same model last October.
The future of Boeing could hang on whether a flaw in the design is found to have caused or contributed to the crashes. Analysts predict a hit of several billion dollars if the maker is found to be at fault. Boeing shares have already fallen by more than
10 per cent.
The impact of grounding the
360 Max jets in service will be mostly felt in the US and Asia, although carriers around the world have ordered several thousand of the aircraft.
Experts believe that the Lion Air Boeing crashed after the crew fought unsuccessfully against a computer-controlled mechanism on the tail that pushes down the nose if it deems the aircraft to be nearing a stall. It is triggered in part by sensors on the outside of the cockpit that detect the angle of air flow, known as angle of attack.
The Lion Air crew were able to bring the nose back up at successive intervals but the computer kept reactivating to counter their commands until it hit the ground.
Pilots can disable the system by flicking two switches on the central flight deck console but the steps for understanding the emergency and intervening remain complicated, crew who are familiar with the aircraft have said.
Several American pilots reported to the US authorities over the past year that they found the system potentially dangerous and they voiced alarm over Boeing’s failure – until the Indonesia crash – to warn pilots of the existence of the new Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).
French investigators have been chosen because of their expertise in downloading and interpreting the contents of flight recorders after disasters.
They led the investigation into the Concorde crash near Paris airport in 2000.
Most significantly they deciphered the damaged memory cards from an Airbus that had lain on the Atlantic seabed for two years after a crash in 2009 in which 228 people were killed.
Black box information on what the pilots and their aircraft were doing explains 90 per cent of all crashes.
The boxes are built to withstand a shock of 3400 times the force of gravity.