Lion Air pilots panicked before jet hit the water

AFP

Indonesian investigators described yesterday the panic of pilots grappling with airspeed and altitude problems in the last moments of their doomed Lion Air flight, as comparisons mounted with a disaster in Ethiopia.

The March 11 Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 on board has set off one of the widest inquiries in aviation history and cast a shadow over the Boeing 737 MAX model intended to be a standard for decades.

Initial investigations show similarities between the Ethiopian crash and the Indonesian accident in October that killed all 189 crew and passengers.

“At the end of the flight, it seemed the pilot felt he could no longer recover the flight. Then the panic emerged,” said Nurcahyo Utomo, an investigator at Indonesia’s national transportation committee.

The investigators said the Lion Air pilots scrambled through a handbook to understand why the jet was lurching downward in the final minutes before it hit the water.

A final report on the Lion Air crash, which has taken on new urgency since the Ethiopian one, is expected in August.

Boeing, fighting to retain its prestige as the world’s biggest planemaker and one of the United States’ most important exporters, has said there was a documented procedure to handle the automated system at the heart of the problem.

In both flights, crews radioed about control problems shortly after takeoff and sought to turn back.

The first report from Ethiopia’s inquiry is expected within a month.

While no direct link has been proven between the two crashes, investigators are focusing on an automated flight-control system, MCAS (maneuvering characteristics augmentation system), that came into service with the MAX two years ago.

The software is designed to prevent a loss of lift which can cause an aerodynamic stall, sending the plane downward in an uncontrolled way.

In the Lion Air crash, it may have been erroneously activated by a faulty sensor, investigators believe.

Boeing charged extra for cockpit safety features that might have helped the pilots as they struggled to control their planes, and now plans to offer one of those features as standard, the New York Times reported yesterday.

The company has promised a swift update to the MCAS, and the US Federal Aviation Administration said the installation of new software and related training was a priority.

For now, more than 350 MAX aircraft are grounded, and deliveries of dozens of planes out of an order backlog of nearly 5,000, worth more than US$500 billion at list prices, are on hold.

In Washington, Boeing is facing investigations by a growing number of parties.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has joined a criminal investigation into the certification of the 737 MAX, the Seattle Times reported, while the Pentagon Inspector General will investigate whether acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, violated ethical rules by allegedly promoting the company while in office.