The real reason Boeing's new plane crashed twice

Video from the channel Vox about Boeing, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 6:00. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

An explanatory piece by Vox, published in April 2019, on the causes of the crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft: Lion Air flight 610, in Indonesia, which killed 189 people, and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, which crashed on 10 March 2019 near Bishoftu, killing 157 people. It argues that the root cause is not just a software fault, but commercial rivalry with Airbus.

In 2010 Airbus announced the A320neo, with larger engines, 15% lower fuel consumption and barely any extra training for pilots. Boeing responded by fitting new engines to the 737. Because the aircraft sits lower to the ground, it had to move the engines forward and raise them. With this change, at full power the nose tended to pitch up, risking a stall. Instead of redesigning the aircraft, Boeing installed the MCAS software, which automatically pushed the nose down, and did not highlight it in training: in many cases this was reduced to a two-hour course on an iPad.

The Lion Air flight took off from Jakarta on 29 October 2018. Faulty sensor data caused the system to push the nose down again and again, and the aircraft fell into the Java Sea twelve minutes after take-off. In Ethiopia the pilots did manage to disable MCAS, but it was already too late. With almost the entire 737 MAX 8 fleet grounded, Boeing was preparing an update that made the system less aggressive and more training on how to disable it, while the FAA faced criticism over the speed of the certification process.