Boeing 737 MAX jets could be grounded for weeks as black box
probe to start on Ethiopia crash
By David Shepardson, Richard Lough and Aaron Maasho
WASHINGTON/PARIS/ADDIS ABABA, March 14 (Reuters) -
Boeing Co's BA.N 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes will be
grounded for weeks if not longer until a software upgrade can be tested and
installed, U.S. lawmakers said on Thursday, as officials in France prepare to
begin analysing the black boxes from a jet that crashed in
Ethiopia.
Boeing said it had paused deliveries of its fastest-selling 737 MAX
aircraft built at its factory near Seattle but continues to produce its
single-aisle jets at full speed while dealing with the worldwide fleet's
grounding.
Investigators in France will be seeking clues into Sunday's deadly
Ethiopian Airlines crash after take-off from Addis Ababa killed 157 people from
35 nations in the second such calamity involving Boeing's plane since October.
Possible links between the accidents have rocked the aviation
industry, scared passengers, and left the world's biggest planemaker scrambling
to prove the safety of a money-spinning model intended to be the standard for
decades.
U.S. Representative Rick Larsen said after a briefing with U.S.
aviation officials the software upgrade would take a few weeks to complete, and
installing it on all aircraft would take "at least through April." He said
additional training would also have to take place.
Boeing has said it would roll out the software improvement "across
the 737 MAX fleet in the coming weeks."
Relatives of the dead stormed out of a meeting with Ethiopian
Airlines on Thursday, decrying a lack of transparency, while others made the
painful trip to the crash scene.
"I can't find you! Where are you?" said one Ethiopian woman, draped
in traditional white mourning shawl, as she held a framed portrait of her
brother in the charred and debris-strewn field.
After an apparent tussle over where the investigation should be held,
the flight data and cockpit voice recorders were handed over to France's Bureau
of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA).
Technical analysis would begin on Friday and the first conclusions
could take several days, the BEA said, posting a picture of the partly crumpled,
orange-cased box.
Nations around the world, including an initially reluctant United
States, have suspended the 371 MAX models in operation, though airlines are
largely coping by switching planes.
Nearly 5,000 MAXs are on order, meaning the financial implications
are huge for the industry. Moody's rating agency said the fallout from the crash
would not immediately affect Boeing's credit rating.
"We continue to build 737 MAX airplanes while assessing how the
situation, including potential capacity constraints, will impact our production
system," Boeing spokesman Chaz Bickers said.
Boeing would maintain its production rate of 52 aircraft per month,
and its newest version, the MAX, represents the lion's share, although Boeing
declined to break out exact numbers.
CONNECTION TO INDONESIA CRASH?
The investigation of Sunday's crash has added urgency since the U.S.
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Wednesday grounded the 737 MAX
aircraft, citing satellite data and evidence from the scene that indicated some
similarities and "the possibility of a shared cause" with October's crash in
Indonesia that killed 189 people.
Though it maintains the planes are safe, Boeing has supported the FAA
move. Its stock is down about 11 percent since the crash, wiping more than $26
billion off its market value. It fell 1 percent on Thursday.
U.S. and Canadian carriers wrestled with customer calls and flight
cancellations and Southwest Airlines Co LUV.N and American
Airlines Group Inc AAL.O, the largest U.S. operators of the
737 MAX, said they had started flying empty MAX aircraft to be parked elsewhere
during the ban.
U.S. President Donald Trump, an aviation enthusiast with deep ties to
Boeing, said he hoped the suspensions would be short. "They have to figure it
out fast," Trump told reporters at the White House.
A software fix for the 737 MAX that Boeing has been working on since
the Lion Air crash in October in Indonesia will take months to complete, the FAA
said on Wednesday.
And in what may presage a raft of claims, Norwegian Air NWC.OL has said it will seek compensation from Boeing for costs
and lost revenue after grounding its fleet of 737 MAX.
Japan became the latest nation to suspend the 737 MAX planes on
Thursday. And airline Garuda Indonesia GIAA.JK said there was
a possibility it would cancel its 20-strong order of 737 MAXs.
WHAT HAPPENED?
Under international rules, Ethiopians are leading the investigation
but France's BEA will conduct black box analysis as an adviser. The U.S.
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was also sending three investigators
to assist.
Only France and the United States have the experience gleaned from
being present at almost every crash involving an Airbus or Boeing respectively.
The cause of the Indonesian crash is still being investigated. A
November preliminary report, before the retrieval of the cockpit voice recorder,
focused on maintenance and training and the response of a Boeing anti-stall
system to a recently replaced sensor, but gave no reason for the
crash.
The pilot of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 had reported internal
control problems and received permission to return, before the plane came down
and burst into a fireball on arid farmland.
(Reporting by Richard Lough, Tim Hepher and John Irish in Paris, Duncan
Miriri and Aaron Masho in Addis Ababa, Jeff Mason and David Shepardson in
Washington, Omar Mohammed and Maggie Fick in Nairobi; Danilo Masoni in Milan,
and Eric M. Johnson in Seattle, Tracy Rucinski in Chicago, Allison Lampert in
Montreal; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Ben Klayman; Editing by Jon Boyle,
Nick Zieminski and Grant McCool)
Back to Top |
Ethiopian jet's black box seen damaged but intact in
photo
PARIS, March 14 (Reuters) - France's air
accident investigation agency on Thursday released a picture of the doomed
Ethiopian Airlines jet's flight data recorder, which appeared to show the
crash-proof housing protecting the critical recording chip intact.
The recorder - one of two 'black boxes' whose data investigators will
analyse to determine what caused Sunday's crash - appears damaged at one
side.
Investigators will also analyse the cockpit voice recorder from the
Boeing 737 MAX 8 which should have picked up the conversations between the
pilots and between the pilots and air traffic controllers.
How to read an aircraft's black box
By Tim Hepher
PARIS, March 14 (Reuters) - France's BEA
safety investigators are searching for clues as to what caused an Ethiopian
Airlines plane to hurtle to the ground after take-off, as they begin analysing
two black boxes that arrived in Paris on Thursday from the crashed Boeing 737
MAX.
Here is how the process works.
WHAT ARE BLACK BOXES?
They are not actually black but high-visibility orange. Experts
disagree how the nickname originated but it has become synonymous with the
public's quest for answers when planes crash.
Many historians attribute their invention to Australian scientist
David Warren in the 1950s.
They are mandatory and the aim is to preserve clues from cockpit
sounds and data to help prevent future accidents.
HOW BIG ARE THEY?
They weigh about 10 pounds (4.5 kilos) and contain four main parts:
* a chassis or interface designed to fix the device and facilitate
recording and playback
* an underwater locator beacon
* the core housing or 'Crash Survivable Memory Unit' made of
stainless steel or titanium
* inside there, the precious finger-nail sized recording chips on
circuit boards which in the latest case could help decide the near-term fate of
Boeing's grounded 737 MAX.
There are two recorders: a Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) for pilot
voices or cockpit sounds and a Flight Data Recorder (FDR).
The BEA released a photo of the FDR from the Ethiopian jet appearing
to show that the chip's crucial housing is intact while the replaceable chassis
is crushed.
HOW WILL THE RECORDERS BE HANDLED?
Technicians peel away protective material and carefully clean
connections to make sure they do not accidentally erase data. The audio or data
file must be downloaded and copied.
The data itself means nothing at first. It must be decoded from raw
files before being turned into graphs.
Investigators sometimes use "spectral analysis" - a way of examining
sounds that allows scientists to pick out barely audible alarms or the first
fleeting crack of an explosion.
HOW MUCH INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE?
The L-3 data chip on a similar Lion Air jet that crashed in October
contained 1,790 parameters over 19 flights.
The CVR contains two hours of recordings, more than enough to cover
the six-minute Ethiopian flight.
"The data recorder typically tells you 'what' and 'how' the event
happened and the cockpit recorder starts to help you understand 'why' but may
not be enough," said an investigator.
WHO HEARS THE TAPE?
The BEA has a listening room like a recording studio with audio
mixing and playback equipment linked to a screen showing synchronised data,
Reuters observed on a recent visit by a group of reporters. Four channels
separate voices and ambient noise.
Only the main investigator and a handful of people hear most tapes,
which are then sealed. In France, where judges routinely carry out parallel
probes, a police officer may be present as well as representatives from foreign
investigation agencies.
A technician will first prepare the recording to ensure it is intact.
In one of the most dramatic events in the 73-year-old BEA's history, legal
sources say it was at this stage that staff first suspected the captain of a
Germanwings jet had been locked out by a suicidal co-pilot in 2015, sending 144
people to their death while he tried to beat down a reinforced
door.
Trauma counselling is available for staff hearing tapes.
HOW LONG WILL THE RESULTS TAKE?
Investigators prefer to work methodically but public and media
pressure can be intense. Depending on any damage to the boxes and type of
accident, some investigators acknowledge they can get a very basic idea in days
or even hours. But they stress this is not always the case and rarely the whole
story.
Interim reports are published after a month but are often sparse.
Deeper investigations take a year or more to complete.
A Lebanese investigation into an Ethiopian Airlines crash in 2010, in
which the BEA also analysed recorders, took two years.
WHAT WILL BLACK BOXES LOOK LIKE IN FUTURE?
A new type of box now being tested by Airbus and the BEA, after it
spent two years searching for Air France 447 which crashed in the Atlantic in
2009, would be built into a floatable panel embedded in the outer skin. Bolts
would retract allowing it to fall away when the plane feels it is about to crash
on water, triggering a radio beacon and avoiding a deep-sea search.
Since that crash and the unresolved disappearance in 2014 of
Malaysian Airlines MH370, there has been intense debate about whether black
boxes should stream live data back to the ground. French regulators are
sceptical, saying it would be hugely costly for little benefit, since most boxes
are quickly found.
HOW HAVE THEY EVOLVED?
Older models used to record on wire, foil or reels of magnetic tape.
Samples of them are now stacked like an Aladdin's cave of vintage machinery
inside the BEA's headquarters at Le Bourget airport, Paris. The BEA needs some
old equipment to work on systems that are still flying on decades-old
aircraft.
Modern versions use computer chips housed inside "crash-survivable"
containers able to withstand g-forces 3,400 times the feeling of gravity.
Graphics on the Ethiopian Airlines crash: https://tmsnrt.rs/2O6jQbI
(Reporting by Tim Hepher; Editing by Susan Fenton)
Back to Top |
Boeing Promised Pilots a 737 Software Fix Last Year, but
They're Still Waiting A delay in a software update after a Boeing 737 Max 8 like this one crashed in Indonesia in October is being scrutinized after the crash of another Max 8 in Ethiopia last weekend. Weeks after a deadly crash involving a Boeing plane last October, company officials met separately with the pilot unions at Southwest Airlines and American Airlines. The officials said they planned to update the software for their 737 Max jets, the plane involved in the disaster, by around the end of 2018. It was the last time the Southwest pilots union heard from Boeing, and months later, the carriers are still waiting for a fix. After a second 737 Max crashed, on Sunday in Ethiopia, United States regulators said the software update would be ready by April. "Boeing was going to have a software fix in the next five to six weeks," said Michael Michaelis, the top safety official at the American Airlines pilots union and a Boeing 737 captain. "We told them, 'Yeah, it can't drag out.' And well, here we are." This delay is now part of the intense scrutiny over Boeing's response after the first air disaster, a Lion Air accident that killed 189 people in Indonesia. The second crash, involving an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed 157 people, bore similarities to the first, pointing to potential problems with the automated system that requires the update. The planned fix was "designed to detect the problem," said Jon Weaks, the president of Southwest's pilot union, "and keep it from recurring." Boeing officials told Southwest union leaders that they didn't believe any extra training was necessary beyond informing the pilots of how the software fix would function. The potential similarities between the two crashes were central to regulators' decision to ground the whole 737 Max line, a family of planes that has been in service for nearly two years. Boeing is now in damage control mode, as carriers cancel flights and try to limit disruptions. Boeing declined to comment for this article. Along with the grounding, Boeing has been forced to halt deliveries of the jets, one of its best-selling planes. Authorities are trying to determine exactly what went wrong, while a senior Democratic lawmaker is planning to examine Boeing's communications with its regulators. The lawmaker, Representative Peter A. DeFazio of Oregon, the chairman of the House transportation committee, has said he will investigate the Federal Aviation Administration's certification of the 737 Max, including why the regulator did not mandate more substantial training for pilots. To qualify to fly the plane, the pilots at American were given a 56-minute iPad training and about a dozen white papers on the differences between the Max aircraft and previous 737 jets, union officials said. Mr. Weaks of Southwest said his members were trained with an e-learning module on a company-issued iPad that consisted of under three hours of video presentations. Both Southwest and American now say they expect to have simulators including the 737 Max systems by the end of this year. American ordered the simulator after the Lion Air crash. The meetings last year between Boeing officials and the unions were cordial but direct. The pilots from Southwest and American who met with Boeing were frustrated that they hadn't been notified of the newly installed software system in the 737 Max planes before the crash in Indonesia. The so-called maneuvering characteristics augmentation system, or MCAS, is an automated system intended to prevent the plane from stalling. "It was a very frank discussion," said the American union's safety chairman, Mr. Michaelis. "This is to our knowledge the first time pilots were not informed of a major system on an airplane that could affect flight controls."  A Boeing 737 Max 8 at Miami International Airport on Thursday. Some of the jets were allowed to fly to be better situated for long-term parking. The pilots demanded more information about the system. Mr. Michaelis said it had been mentioned once in the appendix of the official aircraft manual, but without any explanation about what it was or did. In response to the pilots' request, Mr. Michaelis said, Boeing concurred. The company has since provided the American pilots with basic information about MCAS, but it hasn't updated the official manual with a full explanation about how it works. Mr. Michaelis said Boeing had partly attributed the delay to the recent government shutdown, which caused a backlog at the F.A.A. Daniel K. Elwell, the acting administrator of the F.A.A., said on Wednesday that the 35-day partial government shutdown that stretched from December until late January "did not cause any delay in work on the software." For days after the Ethiopian crash, Boeing and the F.A.A. stood by the safety of the plane. As regulators around the world grounded the plane, the F.A.A. resisted doing the same. Mr. DeFazio said he stepped out of a hearing on Wednesday morning to speak with Mr. Elwell about the plane. Mr. DeFazio said Mr. Elwell assured him there was no cause for alarm. Within hours, President Trump announced the Max would be grounded. "One of my staff, her phone went 'bing' and there it was," Mr. DeFazio said. Mr. Elwell and the F.A.A.'s top safety official, Ali Bahrami, visited Capitol Hill on Thursday to brief members of the House and Senate about the agency's decision-making after the crash in Ethiopia. Mr. Elwell also made the rounds on morning television shows as his agency continued to face questions about its response to the crash as well as the earlier accident in Indonesia. "We're confident in the safety of the airplane," he said on "CBS This Morning." "What we don't know is if there's a linkage between those two accidents, and now that we have the new evidence to suggest there very well may be, we grounded the airplanes to find the linkage." Mr. Trump, at the White House on Thursday, said he hoped the Boeing planes would be back in the air soon. "They have to figure it out fast," he said. "They know that. They're under great pressure." The three American airlines that operate 737 Max aircraft - American and Southwest operate Max 8s and United flies the Max 9 - have scrambled to limit any disruptions caused by the groundings. The airlines have shifted other available aircraft to replace the jets, canceled less popular flights to use those aircraft for busier Max routes, and rebooked some fliers on other airlines. Cancellations will vary by the day based on the availability of other aircraft. American, which has 24 Max 8 jets, canceled 85 flights out of 6,700 on Thursday, but it was able to limit the disruption by scrapping emptier flights on routes where it could rebook those passengers on later flights. For instance, it canceled flights from Dallas to Sacramento and Tucson, booking those fliers on later planes, and used those aircraft to instead operate busier routes between Miami and New York. Southwest, which has 34 Max 8 jets, said it was able to shift enough planes around to cancel just 39 out of its 4,000 scheduled flights on Thursday. And United, which has 14 Max 9 jets, was able to avoid any cancellations from the grounding on Thursday because it shifted many planes from its hub in Denver, where a snowstorm was already disrupting flights. There were still some 737 Max jets flying in American skies on Thursday. The F.A.A. granted the airlines permission to ferry their empty Max jets to new airports for long-term parking. American flew its planes from places like Miami, New York and Tampa, Fla., to places like Tulsa, Orlando, Fla., and Mobile, Ala. |
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Air crash: Probe of black boxes to begin today
 Red cross team work amid debris at the crash site of Ethiopian Airlines near Bishoftu, a town some 60 kilometres southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on March 10, 2019. - An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 crashed on March 10 morning en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi with 149 passengers and eight crew believed to be on board, Ethiopian Airlines said. (Photo by Michael TEWELDE / AFP) Investigators in France will begin analysing the crashed Ethiopian Airlines aircraft's black boxes on Friday (today), seeking clues into a disaster that has angered scores of mourning families and grounded Boeing's global 737 MAX fleet. The black boxes arrived in Paris, France, on Thursday after a tussle over where the investigation should be held. Reuters reports that the flight data and cockpit voice recorders were handed over to France's Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety agency. Sunday's crash after take-off from Addis Ababa killed 157 people from 35 nations in the second of such calamity involving Boeing's new model of B737 Max in six months. Possible links between the accidents have rocked the aviation industry, scared passengers worldwide, and left the world's biggest planemaker scrambling to prove the safety of the model. Boeing, however said in a statement that it had confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX but that after consultation with the United States Federal Aviation Administration, the US National Transportation Safety Board, aviation authorities and its customers around the world, it had determined the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 737 MAX aircraft. The President and Chief Executive Officer of the Boeing Company, Dennis Muilenburg, said "We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution. Safety is a core value at Boeing for as long as we have been building airplanes; and it always will be. "There is no greater priority for our company and our industry. We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again." |
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