People walk past a part of the wreckage at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed near Addis Ababa one year ago Tuesday. It was the second of two fatal Boeing 737 Max crashes within just five months.Both crashes have been attributed to a faulty automated flight-control system called MCAS. However, it was the second crash that confirmed to the world that there was a major, fatal flaw with the plane.The Boeing 737 Max has been grounded around the world since that crash, and continues to sit idle today, as Boeing frantically tries to get the plane certified to return to service.Here’s how the disaster unfolded, and what it’s meant for Boeing, the FAA, and air travel around the world over the past 12 months.Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
At 8:38 a.m. local time, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 took off from Addis Ababa.Six minutes later, the jet slammed into the ground like a missile about 40 miles away, making impact at nearly 700 miles per hour. All 157 passengers and crew were killed.Bound for Nairobi, Kenya, the sleek, modern Boeing 737 Max 8 jet was far from a niche or regional flight. Ethiopian Airlines was, and remains, one of the largest and most successful African airlines, providing links from the Americas and Europe all across the African continent.On this particular flight, passengers hailed from 35 countries including Canada, the US, the UK, Slovakia, Germany, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sweden, India, Russia, Norway, China, France, Israel, and more.
It was the second time in less than five months that a Boeing 737 Max had crashed. The first crash, Lion Air Flight 610 in Indonesia, set off a flurry of alarm about the plane, particularly when a new automated flight system called MCAS was implicated as a cause.Despite some calls to ground the plane, however, it was allowed to continue flying. Boeing and the FAA issued an emergency notice referencing the MCAS system — though not by name — and directions for how to manage erroneous activations.After Ethiopian 302, a consensus that there was something wrong with the plane came swiftly. Fewer than 400 planes had entered service, and already two of them had crashed.The plane type was grounded around the world within the next two days — a year later, the plane still hasn’t returned to service.Now, one year later, here is what happened to Ethiopian Flight 302 that March morning, the ongoing legacy of the crash, and the questions that remain.
Ethiopian Flight 302 took off like any other flight, but things quickly went awry.
File photo: An Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max.
Boeing
Ethiopian 302, a standard flight with Africa’s largest airline on one of the newest planes in the sky, started off normally. Carrying 149 passengers — a mix of business travelers, UN staffers, NGO employees, and families visiting relatives — the plane loaded like a normal flight, taxied to runway 07R at Addis Ababa’s Bole International Airport, and, at 8:38 a.m., sped forward and left the ground.As the tires lifted free of the asphalt, the angle-of-attack, or AOA, sensor on the plane’s nose evidently became damaged. One theory is that a bird hit the delicate vane as the plane lifted off.A minute later, as the pilots retracted the plane’s flaps — extensions on the trailing edge of the wing that can be extended to provide extra lift during takeoff, or when flying at low speeds during final approach for a landing — the regular autopilot turned itself off, and a different automated flight control system adjusted the plane’s tail to direct the aircraft into a dive.The flight control system causing the dive was MCAS, or the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System. The system was designed to make the 737 Max handle like the previous version of the plane, the 737 NG, despite having larger engines in a different position on the wing.MCAS was designed to rely on input from a single AOA sensor, without checking backup or redundant systems. So when that sensor failed or gave erroneous readings, MCAS could kick in.MCAS was a little-known system, left out of the pilot’s operating manual and meant to run in the background. However, after MCAS contributed to the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 nearly five months earlier, Boeing and the US Federal Aviation Administration put out an emergency notice telling pilots how to recognize the effects of a faulty activation, and how to manage them. All the pilots would have to do is flip a switch to disable the electronic system that MCAS used to automatically adjust the tail’s trim — the angle of the broad horizontal surfaces of the tail — and turn a wheel to manually adjust it back.But there was a problem with this recovery technique. By disabling the electronic trim system — thus preventing MCAS from adjusting the trim — the pilots would also deactivate the motor that could help them turn the trim wheel. Because of the way the tail is shaped, strong aerodynamic forces would make it excruciatingly difficult to adjust the trim by hand.This was exactly what happened on Ethiopian 302, but it was compounded by a pilot error. Distracted by the runaway trim stabilizer and the fact that the plane was pointing down, the pilots forgot to reduce the engine power after takeoff. That meant that those aerodynamic forces were even stronger, since the plane was blasting forward at full thrust.For a few minutes, the pilots struggled to control the plane, pulling back with all their might on the control yokes to try and keep the plane’s nose from pointing down. The flight crew contacted air traffic control, and tried to turn back to the airport.Finally, in a last-ditch effort, the pilots briefly turned the electric trim system back on, hoping the motor will help them turn the wheel and regain control. Instead, the MCAS system immediately reengaged, pushing the plane’s nose even further down.Six minutes after it lifted off the runway, Ethiopian Flight 302 slammed like a missile into the ground of a farm about 40 miles away from Addis Ababa. At the moment of impact, it was going nearly 700 miles per hour. Everyone on board was killed instantly,
The 737 Max has been grounded worldwide ever since.
File photo: An undelivered TUI Boeing 737 Max plane sits at a Boeing employee car park in Seattle, Washington, in June 2019.
Stephen Brashear/Getty Images
After the crash of Lion Air 610, there was debate over whether the plane type should be grounded. Although Indonesia ordered emergency inspections on each 737 Max flying in the country, it found them all airworthy within two days, and the rest of the world accepted assurances from Boeing and the FAA.The two issued an Airworthiness Directive warning about possible trim stabilizer control issues due to faulty angle-of-attack indicators. Boeing began working on a software fix to prevent MCAS from inadvertently activating, and disseminated the procedure to deactivate the software in an emergency.The Airworthiness Directive helped the pilots of Ethiopian 302 know what was happening, but it wasn’t enough — they still were unable to recover.On the day of the crash,Ethiopian Airlines grounded the rest of its 737 Max aircraft. A day later, the Chinese aviation authority — the Civil Aviation Administration of China, or CAAC — ordered the country’s airlines to stop flying the plane.Regulators around the world followed, parking their 737 Max planes on March 11 and 12. The US FAA was a lone holdout, initially insisting that the plane was airworthy. However, the agency followed its international counterparts and ordered the plane grounded on March 13.The planes have remained grounded since, as Boeing has worked to complete a software redesign and improve recovery procedures from errant flight system activations.After the second crash, Boeing said that it was working on a software fix, which it expected to distribute within a few weeks. The FAA had said it expected the software to be approved by the end of March, but it announced a delay in early April, saying that it anticipated receiving “Boeing’s final package of its software enhancement over the coming weeks for FAA approval.”However, that delay has stretched on as Boeing and the FAA continued to scrutinize the plane. A variety of new problems have been found, and the return timeline has been pushed back significantly. US airlines have all pulled the plane from their schedules until at least the end of the summer travel season, and Boeing has said it does not expect the plane to return to service until at least “mid-2020.”The FAA has indicated that the plane could make its certification flight in the coming weeks, however, additional steps will remain. A new issue, with wire bundling on the plane, could push the certification flight and the return to service back even farther.Boeing’s board fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg in December for mishandling the crisis, while replacement David Calhoun has tried to reframe the narrative surrounding Boeing. He has not been entirely successful — while he has so-far lived up to his promise to offer more transparency than Muilenburg, there have been some missteps.Questions remain about whether Boeing will fully recover from the crisis, and whether criminal charges will be filed.As the grounding enters its second year, Boeing will hope to get the planes back into service quickly, to resolve open investigations and litigation, and to bring its sales pace back up to what it was before the two crashes.
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