The Federal Aviation Administration didn’t wait too long after an Ethiopian Airlines crash to ground Boeing’s best-selling 737-8 Max, says one former pilot who has worked with airline-disaster investigators.
But aviation regulators in the rest of the world may have acted too quickly, he said.
Before obtaining satellite data from the Ethiopian flight that showed fluctuations in its takeoff angle comparable to those of a Lion Air jetliner that crashed in Indonesia in October, governments had no firm evidence to link the two incidents, said John Cox of Washington, D.C.-based Safety Operating Systems.
“Some of the regulatory agencies really moved out a bit prematurely,” Cox, a pilot for U.S. Airways for 25 years, told the Washington Examiner. “There wasn’t evidence to support what they were doing.”
U.S. airlines, pilots unions, and government officials have said much the same thing, even after groundings by the European Union and countries from China to the U.K. and Australia left America standing largely alone by Wednesday.
President Trump, who announced the FAA’s decision first, said at the time that it may not yet have been necessary. And the Allied Pilots Association, the union representing the 15,000 pilots at American Airlines, stood by an earlier statement that the aircraft was safe to operate, even though members concurred with the FAA’s reasoning in grounding it.
“People around the world are jumping to conclusions about the Boeing 737 Max,” the union said a day before the U.S. grounding. “Federal and international authorities have just begun to look into Sunday’s accident. It is too early to determine possible causes.”
Cox likened the FAA’s dilemma to that of a motorist passing a severe traffic accident that involved the exactly the same model of car he or she was driving. Most, he said, wouldn’t respond by parking their own vehicle.
“The FAA was taking a very data-driven approach, moving very methodically,” Cox said. “Until you know that there’s risk, it’s hard to try to mitigate it or take action.”
Once information from investigators in Ethiopia and flight-tracking data transmitted by the plane to satellites indicated similarities in the pre-crash flight patterns, the agency made the call, he said.
That information was supplied through so-called ADS-B, or automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast, technology that the FAA will begin requiring next year. The system uses satellite navigation to pinpoint planes’ positions more precisely than radar.
Until the data was retrieved and validated, regulators had said they were grounding the planes out of an abundance of caution, given that both crashes involved a model that Boeing began delivering only in mid-2017 and occurred moments after takeoff.
Some members of Congress said those similarities should have been enough for the FAA to act sooner, and committees in the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-led Senate are planning to scrutinize how the agency handles such matters.
In the Indonesian crash, which occurred Oct. 29, a malfunctioning sensor on a 737-8 Max flown by Lion Air fed incorrect data on the airliner’s ascent vector to a computer system that attempted to lower the angle of attack to avoid a stall, officials said.
That prompted a struggle between new computer software — known as a Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS — and the pilot, who ultimately lost control of the aircraft.
All 189 people aboard were killed, and U.S. regulators required airlines to update operations manuals on the handling of such issues, and Boeing is installing a mandated software patch by April.
The fact that the patch hadn’t been completed was part of what prompted the high level of concern after the Ethiopian crash, which occurred Sunday morning outside the capital of Addis Ababa, killing all of the plane’s 157 occupants.
“There must be a rigorous investigation into why the aircraft, which has critical safety systems that did not exist on prior models, was certified without requiring additional pilot training,” Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, said in a joint statement with aviation subcommittee Chairman Rick Larsen, D-Wash. “We plan to conduct rigorous oversight with every tool at our disposal to get to the bottom of the FAA’s decision-making process.”
The Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation will hold its own hearing “to ensure that safety is maintained for all travelers,” said its chairman, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss.
Since only 67 of the 737 Max models are flown by U.S. airlines, grounding them doesn’t disrupt air travel significantly, Thomas Cooke, a professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business who specializes in business ethics and legal liability, told the Washington Examiner.
While Boeing has orders for more than 4,600 of the planes — a fuel-efficient upgrade of its single-aisle airliner used around the world — it has been delivering the planes for less than two years and is still working to ramp up production. Fewer than 400 are in service globally.
“Boeing is an incredible company,” President Trump, who spoke with CEO Dennis Muilenburg about the aircraft’s safety the day before it was parked, told reporters on Wednesday. “They are working very, very hard right now, and hopefully, they’ll very quickly come up with the answer.”
Asserting that the FAA acted in a timely fashion, Trump also said he didn’t want take any chances with safety. “We didn’t have to make this decision today,” he added. “We could’ve delayed it. We maybe didn’t have to make it at all, but I felt — I felt it was important both psychologically and a lot of other ways.”
The Chicago-based company should have recommended sidelining the aircraft after the Lion Air crash, since it involved a new model and a new system, said James Hall, who chaired the independent National Transportation Safety Board from 1994 to 2001. Those years included its investigation of the TWA Flight 800 crash that killed 230 people in 1996.
“I hope Congress is going to look closely,” he told the Washington Examiner. “What was the reason why, when you had an accident with a new aircraft model, you had that significant loss of life, why wasn’t there more aggressive action? If there were things and changes that needed to be made, why wasn’t the aircraft taken out of service?”
