A sensor damaged by a bird or debris may have led to the crash of the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8, killing all 157 aboard, as a preliminary report released Thursday found that the crew followed proper procedures but were unable to regain control of the doomed plane.
“The crew performed all the procedures repeatedly provided by the manufacturer, but was not able to control the aircraft,” Ethiopian Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges said, citing findings based on the voice and flight data recorders.
In the first official report on the March 10 disaster, Moges called for the MAX 8’s controversial flight control system to be reviewed by Boeing.
“Aviation authorities shall verify that the review of the aircraft flight control system has been adequately addressed by the manufacturer before the release of the aircraft for operations,” she added.
The preliminary findings show the aircraft had a valid certificate of airworthiness, the pilots were licensed and qualified to fly the plane, and its takeoff appeared to be “very normal,” Moges told reporters at a press conference in the capital, Addis Ababa.
Flight 302 went down in clear weather, six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport en route to Nairobi, Kenya.
Investigators are looking into the role of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, a flight control system known by its acronym, MCAS, which under some situations can automatically lower the plane’s nose to prevent a stall.
The MAX has been grounded worldwide pending a software fix that Boeing is rolling out and that needs approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and other regulators.
Ethiopian investigators did not specifically mention the MCAS on Thursday.
Meanwhile, two aviation sources familiar with the investigation told ABC News that the doomed flight sustained a damaged angle-of-attack sensor upon takeoff from a bird or foreign object, triggering erroneous data and the activation of the anti-stall system.
According to the sources, the crew did not try to electronically pull the nose up before following Boeing’s emergency procedures of cutting power to the horizontal stabilizer on the rear of the plane.
One source told the network they manually tried to raise the nose back up by using the trim wheel. Soon after, the pilots restored power to the horizontal stabilizer.
With the power restored, the MCAS was re-engaged, the sources said, and the pilots failed to regain control before the crash.
But the preliminary findings dispute that there was any foreign object damage, or FOD, to the aircraft.
“We did not find any information regarding the FOD (foreign object damage) on the aircraft,” Amdye Andualem, chairman of the Ethiopian Accident Investigation Bureau, said Thursday. “The data provided by the FDR (flight data recorder) doesn’t indicate that there is an FOD.”
With Post wires
https://nypost.com/2019/04/04/initial-report-says-damaged-sensor-may-have-doomed-ethiopian-airlines-flight/
2019-04-04 12:04:00Z
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