After months of dismissing the concerns of flyers, Boeing has for the first time admitted wrongdoing in the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed last month, killing 157 people, all on board.
The apology came right after Ethiopia released preliminary findings from an ongoing investigation into the crash and after the first American wrongful death lawsuit against Boeing was filed. The report found similarities in the technical issues experienced by pilots on both the Ethiopian Airlines flight and October’s Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610, which also crashed just minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 people on board. Both flights were on the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft.
The family of 24-year-old Samya Stumo, who died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash, filed a lawsuit against Boeing and a claim against the Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Chicago, where Boeing is headquartered. It reads in part, “Blinded by its greed, Boeing haphazardly rushed the 737 MAX 8 to market, with the knowledge and tacit approval of the United States Federal Aviation Administration … Boeing’s decision to put profits over safety … and the regulators that enabled it, must be held accountable for their reckless actions”. Samya Stumo’s father, mother and brother spoke alongside their lawyer at the news conference on Thursday.
Samya’s mother Nadia, “We are one of 337 families with such huge holes because this aircraft didn’t function. Samya and her fellow passengers shouldn’t have died. Those in charge of creating and selling this plane did not treat Samya as they would their own daughters. We as passengers need to demand that planes be safe so that no one else dies. Profits should not come before safety. And we are making this effort here to help prevent a third crash.”
Frank Pitre, with the law firm of Cotchett Pitre & McCarthy talking:
The history is that Boeing, 10 years ago, was facing competition, and it was facing competition from Airbus. There’s no secret. So, around 2010, Airbus was coming out with more fuel-efficient engines. Boeing saw that as a threat to their international competition for the sale of aircraft. They knew that they were behind, and they needed to get their planes out in the marketplace that could compete with Airbus quickly; ergo, the motivation.
What they decided to do is they decided that they couldn’t wait the amount of time it would take to fully redesign an aircraft, so they took a shortcut. They used the existing airframe, and what they did is they decided to put larger engines and more fuel-efficient engines on that plane—except for a couple of problems. When you put larger engines on a plane that was that old and vintage—the plane was designed where the wings are very low to the ground. So when you put those larger engines on, you need more clearance. So what happens is, you have to move those engines forward. You’ll also have to move the landing gears forward. And when you change the position of the engines, you change the landing gear, you change the aerodynamics of the aircraft.
Now, when that happens, you do those kinds of changes, you have to retrain pilots, because the plane behaves differently. And in this case, the plane, because of the larger engines, has a tendency to thrust upward faster and more powerfully than the originally designed 737 model.
Well, rather than spend the time and force air carriers to take time to train their pilots and to go through more costly training, the decision was that Boeing would come up with its own software that would help have the plane behave the same way the older 737 behaved. And they did that with the design of the MCAS system. The MCAS system is an automated system that would control the tendency of the airplane to buck upward, that when it sensed the plane and the nose of the aircraft was moving up, the automatic signals would be sent to the MCAS system and the horizontal stabilizer to push the nose down. Now, that would all be done automatically without the knowledge of the pilots. And that’s critical to avoid retraining. The pilots could operate the plane the same way they operated prior iterations. The system would all take care of adjustments to the aircraft and its behavior tendencies automatically, without any need to retrain pilots.
On October 29th of 2018, we know there was the Lion Air crash. And that’s when things began to unravel. The dangers that had been concealed about the plane’s tendencies and its aerodynamics now start to manifest themselves. At a meeting where some pilot union representatives were present, a Boeing executive was quoted as saying they didn’t pass on the differences in the plane’s tendencies and the operation of the MCAS system onto pilots, because they didn’t want to inundate them with new information.
In November of 2018, as you know from the history, Boeing and the FAA issued, in our view, incomplete and ineffective airworthiness directives that failed to address the design problems and led people to believe that the problem could be cured by simply telling pilots to deactivate the system and everything would be fine. No need to worry, the plane was safe.
Unfortunately, history had to repeat itself. A hundred and fifty-six people lost their lives. …
The other piece of information that came out just a couple days ago, if we could
was a letter that was written by the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, dated April 2nd, 2019. There’s copies here if you want it; you can read it for yourself. But it had received information from whistleblowers that the FAA was known to have inspectors who were not properly trained or qualified to do their job of oversight, and that that lack of training, lack of qualification included individuals who were involved in the 737 MAX 8. In light of that information, it was left to Boeing to police itself with respect to safety concerns about the airplane. It is reported in the Senate letter that the FAA may have been notified about the deficiencies as early as August of 2018. Once again, a failure.
— source democracynow.org | Apr 05, 2019