How many Boeing 737 MAX planes have crashed?

The first was Lion Air Flight 610, a 737 MAX 8 barely three months into service, which crashed into the Java Sea 13 minutes after taking off from Jakarta on October 29, 2018, killing all 189 people on board. The second, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, another MAX 8, crashed six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019, killing 157. In both cases the pilots fought an aircraft that kept pitching nose-down on its own, again and again, until they lost control. That's 346 victims in total.

Investigations by Indonesia and Ethiopia, along with the NTSB and US Congress review, pointed to MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), a software system that pushed the nose down when it detected an excessive angle of attack. The new LEAP-1B engines, larger and mounted further forward, tended to raise the nose at high power, and MCAS was meant to correct that. But it relied on a single angle-of-attack sensor: with that sensor faulty, the system activated repeatedly, and crews didn't even know it existed because Boeing had left it out of the manuals to avoid requiring simulator training.

The global fleet, about 385 aircraft, was grounded from March 13, 2019 until the FAA lifted the ban on November 18, 2020, after MCAS was redesigned with two sensors, activation limits and mandatory simulator training. Boeing paid over $2.5 billion in a settlement with the Department of Justice and suffered billions in losses. No MAX has been lost in a fatal accident since, although the in-flight door plug blowout on an Alaska Airlines MAX 9 on January 5, 2024, with no fatalities, reopened scrutiny of manufacturing quality and limited production rates for months.