Federal regulators suspected that the Boeing 737 Max could become one of the most accident-prone planes constructed in decades.
The Federal Aviation Administration concluded in a November 2018 report that the 737 Max model would average one fatal crash every two to three years, a substantial increase over other Boeing airliners in use today, according to the Wall Street Journal. Neither the agency nor Boeing publicly revealed the report’s findings.
Design flaws in the Max contributed to two fatal crashes since October 2018: a Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people on Oct. 29, 2018, and an Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people on March 10, 2019.
“It was clear from the beginning that an unsafe condition existed,” an FAA representative said. “[The November 2018 report] provided additional context in helping determine the mitigation action.”
The FAA representative also said that safety analyses often overstate the danger of a crash because the studies exaggerate the risk caused by defects.
The agency declined to ground the 737 Max following the risk assessment after securing an agreement with Boeing to notify flight crews across the globe on how to respond to a flaw in the plane’s anti-stalling system that led to the Lion Air crash. The agency believed that training would buy time for Boeing to design and install a fix to the system before another deadly crash took place.
The FAA assumption proved fatally wrong five months later after an Ethiopian Airlines flight suffered the same system defect and crashed, killing all on board and bringing the total amount of lives lost to the flawed system up to 346.
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