Pilots searched for checklist

Indonesian investigators said on Thursday the cockpit voice recorder from a crashed Lion Air Boeing Co 737 MAX 8 jet showed pilots were searching for the right checklist in their handbooks while experiencing airspeed and altitude issues.

The details revealed at a media conference corroborated a Reuters report on Wednesday based on three sources with knowledge of the cockpit voice recorder’s contents.

Investigators said they had 90% of the data needed for a final report on the October crash that killed 189 people.

The report is now expected to be released in August.

An investigator at Indonesia’s national transportation committee, Nurcahyo Utomo, said the recording showed there was panic in the cockpit in the last 20 seconds.

“At the end of the flight, it seemed the pilot felt he could no longer recover the flight, then the panic emerged.”

The investigation has taken on new urgency after a second 737 MAX 8 crash at Ethiopian Airlines last week killed 157 people and led to the global grounding of the model.

French air accident investigation agency BEA said on Tuesday the flight data recorder in the Ethiopian crash showed clear similarities to the Lion Air disaster.

Investigators examining the Indonesian crash are considering how a computer ordered the plane to dive in response to data from a faulty sensor and whether the pilots had enough training to respond appropriately to the emergency.

A different crew on the same plane the evening before encountered the same problem with the computer ordering the plane’s nose down, but solved it after running through three checklists, according to a preliminary report released in November.

The captain of the doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight did not practise on a new simulator for the Boeing 737 MAX 8 before he died in the crash, a pilot colleague said.

Yared Getachew, 29, was due for refresher training at the end of March, his colleague said, two months after Ethiopian Airlines had received one of the first such simulators being distributed.

The March 10 disaster has set off one of the biggest inquiries in aviation history, focusing on the safety of a new automated system and whether crews understood it properly.

The MAX, which came into service two years ago, has a new automated system called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System).

It is meant to prevent loss of lift which can cause an aerodynamic stall, sending the plane downwards in an uncontrolled way.

“Boeing did not send manuals on MCAS,” the Ethiopian Airlines pilot said, declining to give his name as staff have been told not to speak in public.

“Actually we know more about the MCAS system from the media than from Boeing.”

Under unprecedented scrutiny and with its MAX fleet grounded worldwide, the world’s largest planemaker has said airlines were given guidance on how to respond to the activation of MCAS software. – Reuters

‘Actually we know more about the MCAS system from the media than from Boeing’ Pilot

ETHIOPIAN AIRLINES