Plane maker, airline biker, may geopardise Ethiopian crash probe

• Crashed pilot didn’t train on B737 MAX simulator-Witnesses
• Allegation uninformed, irresponsible, misleading-Ethiopian Airlines

The hope of knowing exactly why Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 went down six minutes after take-off from the Bole International Airport, Addis Ababa killing all 157 passengers on-board including two Nigerians may not materialise at least for now.

Reason: Blames and counter blames are beginning to characterise efforts to get to the root of the accident that occurred on March 10, 2019 killing Nigerian-born Canadian professor, writer, literary critic, satirist, and columnist, Pius Adesanmi and diplomat Abiodun Bashua.

While the manufacturer, Boeing maintains its trust in the airplane, people close to Ethiopian Airlines’ operations said the captain of the doomed Flight 302 never trained on the simulator.

Ethiopian Airlines surpassed many carriers by becoming one of the first to install a simulator to teach pilots how to fly the new Boeing 737 Max 8.

Boeing has said that experienced 737 pilots needed little training for the new Max 8, an assertion that has now come under close scrutiny by regulatory officials and pilots at other airlines. Two of the planes have fatally crashed in the past five months, and regulators around the world grounded all Max 8s last week.

 The people, who spoke  to Reuters on condition of anonymity because Ethiopian Airlines had not authorized disclosure of the information, said the carrier had the Max 8 simulator up and running in January, two months before Flight 302 crashed.

The pilot of Flight 302, Yared Getachew, who had 8,000 hours of flying experience including on the 737, was said to have taken a refresher course on a different simulator in late September and early October.

According to one person familiar with the airline, he was not due for another round of simulator training until after the crash on March 10.

It was unclear if the second pilot on Flight 302, the co-pilot, had trained on the Max 8 simulator. Nor was it clear if the airline had used the simulator for refresher courses it requires pilots to take every six months, or only to train new pilots.

Still, use of the simulator by Ethiopian Airlines means the carrier was among the few in the world that not only had a working simulator for Boeing Max jets but was using it a few months after the first Max 8 crash, Lion Air Flight 610.

Despite Boeing’s assertions that the plane was safe, the crashes have raised questions about whether Boeing and its American regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration, did enough to train pilots on how to deal with the Max 8’s new features, in particular an automated system to prevent stalls known as MCAS.

Hours after the disclosure Ethiopian Airlines tweeted in a statement challenging what it described as “wrong reporting” without specifying what was incorrect in a statement to the media yesterday said its pilots completed the Boeing recommended and the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved differences training from the B737NG aircraft to the Ethiopian operation and before they start flying the B737-8 MAX.

According to the management, “The pilots are also made aware and well briefed on the emergency airworthiness directive issued by the FAA following the Lion Air accident. The content of the airworthiness directive has also been well incorporated in all pilots training manuals, operational procedures and working manuals. The B737MAX full flight simulator is not designed to simulate the MCAS system problems”.

The carrier urged all concerned to refrain from making such “uninformed, incorrect, irresponsible and misleading statements during the period of the accident investigation. International regulations require all stakeholders to wait patiently for the result of the investigation”.

The airline’s statement did not include information on the captain’s simulator training.

However, its statement said that its pilots had completed “differences training” recommended by Boeing and approved by the F.A.A. before they switched to flying the Max 8 jets from an earlier Boeing 737 model.

 Boeing said that pilots who had flown earlier models did not need additional simulator training, and even after the October crash in Indonesia, the F.A.A. agreed.

Many pilots learned the new features of the Boeing on an iPad, and many were not originally informed of the existence of the automated system, which can push the plane’s nose down if it is approaching a stall.

The Ethiopian and Lion Air flights crashed minutes after take-off and showed similar up-and-down oscillations before fatal nose-dives. A central focus of the Indonesian investigation is the possibility that the automated system pushed the nose down into a fatal dive because of inaccurate input from a sensor.

The Ethiopian Flight 302 crash killed all 157 aboard and the Lion Air Flight 610 crash killed all 189.

An investigation is still underway to determine what caused the crash in Ethiopia. A possible fault in the MCAS system is part of the inquiry, and the authorities in Ethiopia have said that a preliminary review of the “black boxes” — voice recording and flight data-revealed similarities to the Indonesian crash.

But experts have cautioned that any conclusions at this stage of an investigation are preliminary and could change.

Wole Shadare