Three days after after one of Boeing’s newest commercial airliners tumbled from the sky over Ethiopia in a crash that bore striking similarities to one in Indonesia just months earlier, the U.S. and Canada were among the few nations still allowing the plane to fly.
Satellite data proving the two tragedies were even more similar than they first appeared, since both involved unusual fluctuations in the angle of takeoff, helped to change that.
By the afternoon of Wednesday, March 13, both Washington and Ottawa had sidelined the aircraft — the best-selling plane in Boeing’s history — until investigators could determine with more certainty what had gone wrong.
“The U.S. has the greatest record of aviation in the world, so I didn’t want to take any chances with that,” President Trump said when he announced the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision, citing information including reports from investigators on the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines crash. Occurring outside Addis Ababa on Sunday, it killed all 157 people aboard.
Information gathered from satellite tracking of the March 10 crash, which was cited by the FAA, was detailed thoroughly by Canada’s transportation minister, who announced his decision only hours before Washington’s.
While there’s not enough data yet to conclude that the same problem occurred in both the Ethiopian and Indonesian crashes, “we decided that, given the comparison with the previous flight, it was prudent to make this decision,” Transportation Minister Marc Garneau said in a news conference in Ottawa.
The move followed similar actions in the European Union, as well as countries from China to the United Kingdom, where regulators described sidelining the plane as a precaution. The circumstances of the disaster immediately prompted comparisons with the Indonesian accident on Oct. 29, since both occurred shortly after takeoff and involved a plane that Boeing only began delivering in 2017.
The circumstances left some passengers anxious to avoid the aircraft, which is flown by just a few U.S. airlines, and prompted U.S. politicians to urge quicker and more decisive action by the FAA.
In the Indonesian crash, which killed 189 people, a malfunctioning sensor on a 737 MAX 8, flown by Lion Air, fed incorrect data on the airliner’s ascent vector to a computer system that attempted to lower the angle to avoid a stall, Garneau said.
[Related: FAA grounded Boeing’s 737-8 MAX after seeing ‘link’ between Ethiopian, Lion Air crashes]
That prompted a struggle between the plane’s computer system, known as Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, and the pilot, who ultimately lost control of the aircraft. U.S. regulators required airlines to update operations manuals on the handling of such issues afterward.
“There were certain fluctuations in the vertical profile” of the Ethiopian Airlines plane akin to those of the aircraft in Indonesia, Garneau said. “This is not the proof that it is the same root problem,” he cautioned, “and it could be something else. We need to wait to see that data and hear the voices on the recorders, the black boxes that were found, which have more information.”
Boeing, whose stock slid more than 11 percent in the first two trading days after the Ethiopian crash, rallied slightly after the U.S. grounding. The plane-maker recommended the FAA’s move out of an “abundance of caution,” said CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who had assured Trump of the aircraft’s reliability in a phone call just a day earlier.
“Safety is a core value at Boeing for as long as we have been building airplanes, and it always will be,” Muilenburg said in a statement. “We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again.”
For the plane-maker, the initial conclusion of the Ethiopian crash investigation will be pivotal, debt-ratings firm Fitch said in a report.
“If there is a correlation between the causes of the two recent crashes, we expect the situation to worsen, and lengthy groundings and delivery delays to ensue,” the firm noted. “We will also watch for the effects on the flying public’s sentiment toward the MAX.”
[Also read: Obama delivers speech to Boeing after $10M donation made to his presidential center]
If repairs are required, they would likely be applied to the current global fleet of fewer than 400 MAX planes first, then incorporated into Boeing’s production, Fitch said. How that would affect Boeing’s plans to boost output of the plane to 57 a month, a necessary step toward meeting more than 4,600 orders, isn’t yet clear.
Deliveries of an estimated 590 MAX planes this year might have represented as much as $30 billion in revenue, the firm noted. That compares with $100 billion in sales companywide in 2018.
