Pilots’ concerns: ‘Such jury rigging to fly is a red flag’
In the months before an Ethiopian Airlines crash killed 157 people Sunday, the second recent deadly crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 jetliner, U.S. pilots complained to authorities about perceived safety problems with the same aircraft.
Two pilots reported that their aircraft unexpectedly pitched nose-down after they engaged autopilot after departure. Another pilot reported a “temporary level-off ” triggered by the aircraft automation. The captain of a flight in November 2018 called part of the aircraft’s flight manual “inadequate and almost criminally insufficient.”
“The fact that this airplane requires such jury rigging to fly is a red flag,” that captain – who was not identified – wrote in a report to the federal Aviation Safety Reporting System. The captain said part of the jet’s flight system was “not described in our Flight Manual.”
Records show that federal aviation authorities received at least 11 reports concerning the Boeing 737 MAX 8 from professional aviators logged from April 2018 to December 2018.
Sunday’s crash in Ethiopia followed the crash Oct. 29, 2018, of Lion Air Flight 610, in which 189 passengers and crew died when the plane plunged into the Java Sea outside Indonesia. Both flights crashed after experiencing drastic speed fluctuations during ascent, and their pilots had tried to return to the airport.
Regulators and industry experts suspect that MAX 8’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, may have caused the jets to make unwanted dives.
Flight data recovered from the Indonesia crash indicated pilots repeatedly tried to get the plane’s nose up before impact. After the crash, Boeing issued a service bulletin warning pilots that erroneous flight data fed into the MCAS could force the aircraft into a dive for up to 10 seconds.
After the crash in Ethiopia, the company said it had no new guidance.
The pilot complaints, first reported Tuesday by The Dallas Morning News, emerged as aviation regulators around the world were hustling to respond to the two crashes in five months.
In one documented complaint, a pilot said the plane’s dive triggered the ground proximity warning system, which is designed to alert pilots when their planes are in immediate danger. The complaint states an alarm sounded “don’t sink, don’t sink” before the captain disconnected the autopilot and manually adjusted the plane to climb.
Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Lynn Lunsford declined to comment on the specific complaint reports. Lunsford noted the reports do not discuss MCAS, the feature suspected to have played a role in both crashes.
Kristy Kiernan, an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s college of aeronautics in Daytona Beach, Florida, cautioned against drawing conclusions from the MAX 8 aircraft complaint reports, which she reviewed for USA TODAY.
“There’s nothing that really struck me as a pattern,” Kiernan said. “I just don’t think there’s anything you can draw from it at all.”