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Louis Ibah
Air travellers around the world have been rattled by Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737-800MAX aircraft that crashed a fortnight ago in Addis Ababa killing 157 people.
While the world is used to acknowledging the possibility of older planes developing faults with age and thus prone to accidents,, it’s somewhat absurd to have five to seven month old aircraft crash as witnessed with the Boeing 737MAX 8.
The first crash occurred on October 29, 2018. Twelve minutes after an almost brand-new Boeing 737 Max 8 belonging to the Indonesian budget airline, Lion Air took off, it began to plunge into the Java Sea at high speed, ultimately killing 189 people.
Less than five months later, on March 10, 2019, another state-of-the-art Max 8 operated by Ethiopian Airlines took off from the Addis Ababa airport, dipped its nose unexpectedly six minutes later and slammed into the ground at a speed of 700 kilometers per hour (435 miles per hour). That crash killed 157 people.
The 200-seat Boeing 737 Max 8 has been a popular plane since it was launched into the market in 2017, with more than 5,000 planes so far ordered by airline operators, including nigeria’s Arik Air, Air Peace and Green African Airlines.
The plane sold quickly based on features that passengers crave — a quieter cabin, more legroom — and bottom-line benefits to airlines, like being the most fuel efficient aircraft in the Boeing fleet.
But passenger anxiety and fears have led to apathy for the Boeing 737MAX 8. For instance, Alicia Winnett and her husband had planned to fly Air Canada from Vancouver to Calgary last Friday, and she contacted the airline, via Twitter, after hearing about Sunday’s plane crash in Ethiopia.
The airline confirmed that her flight is scheduled to be on the Boeing 737 Max 8, adding, “have a great safety, reliability and customer satisfaction rating.”
“How could they say that a Boeing 737 Max 8 has a great safety record when two brand-new planes have tragically crashed within five months of each other in a seemingly similar manner,” Ms. Winnett wrote in an email.
“I am hoping to switch to a later flight on an Airbus 320. I just cannot sit on a Boeing 737 Max 8 with confidence,” she added.
What’s wrong with the Boeing MAX 8
Boeing’s new airplane has only been around for two years and already two 737 Max 8s have crashed, killing 346 people. Analyst, Marco Evers attributes the disasters to a design flaw that emerged when engineers began cutting corners.
“The parallels between the two accidents, however, are obvious: Both planes’ pilots fought unsuccessfully to gain altitude. Both wanted to turn around and return to their departure airports due to technical issues. Neither made it,” said Evers.
Indeed, the pilots of the Indonesian plane evidently faced several problems, according to investigators. The worst was malfunctioning software, the existence of which wasn’t even mentioned in the plane’s manual. It had taken over control of the aircraft’s tailplane, which helps regulate pitch. The software then initiated a nosedive, which the pilots were helpless to override.
Cutting Corners
After two horrific crashes in less than five months, the latest model of the 737 aircraft, is now under general suspicion. Already, 50 countries have banned all 737 Max 8s from their airspace, including every member of the European Union and Nigeria.
Boeing is hurtling. On Monday, Boeing’s share price dropped by more than 10 percent.
In order to remain competitive, Boeing has repeatedly revised, upgraded and improved the Boeing 737, and it has grown more economical and quieter with each new iteration; it gained in size, range and efficiency.But there was a catch. The engineers who were performing all of these miracles of rejuvenation knew full well that they were making compromises they never would have tolerated in a newer model. The consequences of that corner-cutting may now be revealing themselves.
Makeshift Solutions
When Boeing began developing the Boeing Max 8 in 2011, one thing was clear: The engine would be powered by a very fuel-efficient engine known as Leap, made by the company CFM. Boeing’s rival, Airbus, had also equipped its well-selling A320neo with the same propulsion hardware. Boeing however had targeted coming out with the most fuel efficient jet aircraft with the Boeing 737MAX 8.
One of the reasons the Leap engine is so economical is because its air intake has an enormous diameter: 198 centimeters (6.5 feet). While the long-legged Airbus A320neo has plenty of room for such a massive engine, the landing gear on Boeing’s Max 8 is short, limiting ground clearance under the wings. The engine simply doesn’t fit.
Pressed to come up with a solution, Boeing’s star engineers came up with the idea of shortening the engine mount structure, which fastens the heavy engines to the underside of the wings. This did the trick, but it came at the cost of seriously altering the aircraft’s flight mechanics. As a result, the Max 8 tended to dangerously raise its nose. Under certain circumstances — rare and extreme, to be sure, yet possible nonetheless — there was a greater chance of the plane stalling and even crashing.
Boeing engineers, in turn, came up with another makeshift solution. They developed a software that would work in the background. As soon as the nose of the aircraft pointed upward too steeply, the system would automatically activate the tailplane and bring the aircraft back to a safe cruising plane. The pilots wouldn’t even notice the software’s intervention — at least that was the idea. In fact, Boeing didn’t even consider it necessary to inform pilots about the newfangled MCAS, or “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.”
An Unfulfilled Promise
What the people at Boeing obviously hadn’t considered was that the MCAS was extremely sensitive, as evidenced by the Lion Air crash. Sensors are constantly monitoring the aircraft’s position as it glides through the airstream. All it takes is for a single sensor to malfunction and erroneously report that the angle of the plane is too high; after that, the MCAS takes over and lowers the nose. Pilots don’t even know what’s happening to them. They can pull on the yoke all they want, yet the computer continues to work against them, making a crash inevitable.
And that appears to be the problem with the Boeing 737MAX 8.
After the Lion Air crash, Boeing announced that it would be releasing a software update at the beginning of 2019. So far, no such update has been released.
