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TZUTC: 0100
The French aviation accident board BEA is critical of the final report on the
fatal accident involving the Boeing MAX 8 of Ethiopian Airlines in March 2019.
According to BEA, their Ethiopian colleagues withheld important information
about the actions of the pilots from the report. Earlier, the American NTSB
expressed similar criticism.
 
Ethiopian flight ET302 crashed into a field shortly after take-off from Addis
Ababa on March 10, 2019. All 157 people on board were killed. The main cause
was misinformation from a sensor. As a result, the MAX 8's on-board computer
instructed the so-called MCAS system to push the nose of the Boeing down four
times.
 
The two pilots were insufficiently aware of what was going on and could no
longer keep the plane in the air. After the accident, it became clear that
there was a direct connection to the fatal crash of a MAX 8 of Lion Air in
Indonesia in October 2018. Here, too, the Maneuvering Characteristics
Augmentation System intervened several times, but in both accidents the pilots
did not know how to turn this off because they didn't know it enough. The two
accidents prevented the MAX from flying for 20 months.
 
In the final report presented at the end of December, the Ethiopian Accident
Board EAIB describes in detail how information from a broken Angle of Attack
sensor activated the MCAS system, leading to the crash. But like the American
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the French Bureau d'Enquetes et
d'Analyses pour la securite de l'aviation civile (BEA) also believes that the
report ignores important conclusions from the investigation.
 
For example, operational aspects and the behavior of the two pilots of ET302
are insufficiently addressed in the final report, "especially in the course of
events before MCAS intervened for the first time. As a result, the reader of
the report cannot form an exact and complete picture of the events."
 
As an example, BEA mentions that shortcomings in the behavior of the pilots,
especially during the first phase of the flight, were insufficiently analysed.
When the stick shaker activated after take-off because the aircraft threatened
to end up in a stall situation, the pilots should have switched off the
autopilot and the automatic engine control (autothrottle). Instead of
disabling these systems to gain control of the aircraft, they only tried to
push the nose down.
 
According to BEA, the actions indicate that the pilots experienced enormous
stress in a short time after the stick shaker and other warnings went off. The
crew hardly communicated with each other, as could be heard on the cockpit
voice recorder recording. BEA regrets that entire parts of the recording have
not been reproduced in the final report. The French agency concludes that
"inadequate actions by the crew and insufficient attention to crew resource
management played a role in the chain of events leading up to the crash." The
report limits itself to mentioning the entry into force of MCAS as the most
likely cause of the accident.
 
The NTSB also said immediately after the publication of the final report that
too little attention was paid to the behavior of the pilots. The Americans
also found that insufficient investigation had been carried out into why the
sensor on the disaster aircraft had broken down. The EAIB blames this on an
electrical problem, but according to the NTSB it is very likely that the
sensor was damaged by a bird strike while taxiing at the airport. BEA notes
that this conclusion was already presented to the Ethiopian researchers in
September 2019, but it does not appear in the final report.

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