Today, Explained - Boeing 737 Max

Episode Date: March 14, 2019

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed on Sunday killing all 157 aboard. The response was unprecedented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before we start our show, a note about another show. It's called Vanguard by Shopify Studios. Every episode takes you into the journey a small business is going on, and these small businesses represent subcultures you didn't even know existed. New episodes drop every Wednesday, and you can find this show, I'm almost certain, wherever you find your podcasts. A global tragedy as it's close to home and the United Nations is united in grief. Memorials were held today in Ethiopia

for some of the victims of an Ethiopian airline plane that crashed on Sunday. Passengers from 33 countries were on board when the flight crashed six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa's Borlai International Airport. The World Food Programme lost seven staffers, while six were lost from the UN regional headquarters in Nairobi. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation,

the International Organisation for Migration, the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Environment Programme, the International Tele for Migration, the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Environment Program, the International Telecommunications Union, the World Bank, and the UN Assistance Mission in Somalia, all lost staff. They all had one thing in common,

a spirit to serve the people of the world and to make it a better place for us all. Let us honor the memories of our colleagues by keeping their spirit of service alive. There's this somber routine to a plane crash. We hear about the death toll, then we hear about the victims, then there's speculation, and then there's more speculation, then we get an investigation, the black box, and hopefully some answers.

The crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 has been different. Sunday, the response from people and countries around the world is actually unprecedented. And it's all because of Lion Air Flight 610. Karen Walker is the editor-in-chief at Air Transport World. She's going to talk about the two flights before we get to the international response that has already made this most recent tragedy historic. This started off as a very routine flight, scheduled flight, Ethiopian Airlines, and it's a Boeing 737 MAX, specifically the MAX 8. It took off from Addis Ababa. It had 157 people on board, that includes the pilots and crew, and then something happened very fast. It was apparently a good weather day, what they call clear visibility.

The plane took off, and about six minutes later, it crashed, and it was a catastrophic crash in that everyone was killed, lots of wreckage. The airline CEO has said that the captain of the plane issued a distress call and asked for clearance to return to the airport. Obviously, it would not have gone very far in six minutes, and clearly it didn't make that. All contact was lost, and the plane crashed in Debre Zeit, 31 miles south of the capital. They found the wreckage. The plane was ripped apart.

There are even bits and pieces sitting behind me that are only maybe an inch big, metal just torn apart. Strewn amongst the wreckage, items of clothing and personal belongings, a jarring reminder of just how many lives were lost. And they have, very importantly, been able to get the two, what people call black boxes, from that wreckage. There's one that records the pilots, what they're saying in the cockpit, and the other records key flight data. That alone won't say what happened, but it will give some early indicators, probably more likely as to things that can be ruled out.

How does this compare to the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last October? If you're looking for what was the same, okay, well, it was the same aircraft, the MAX 8, a routine scheduled flight. The captain in both flights were very well experienced. They each had around 8,000 hours. The captain, like the one in the Ethiopian crash, did a distress signal requesting to turn back. But in both cases, whatever happened, happened very quickly, and the pilot was not able to regain control of the aircraft. Crash investigators who've recovered the flight data recorders say it tells the story of 11 minutes of terror as the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 fought a tug-of-war battle with the plane's computer to keep the plane in the air. What you see is the nose goes up and then the nose goes down. Nose goes up, nose goes down.

That seems to indicate that, you know, the plane was pushing the nose down to prevent a stall and then the captain was trying to pull the nose back up. Up and down more than two dozen times, the plane's computer pushing the nose down towards the ocean, the pilots fighting to pull the nose up, finally losing the battle as the plane slammed into the ocean at 450 miles per hour. So we do know that from that data. What we don't yet know is what caused that to happen and why it couldn't be resolved by the pilots in time. What do we know about the aircraft, the Boeing 737 MAX? It's new, right? It is, yeah, that's right.

So the Boeing MAX is a new family of what they call narrowbody aircraft. It's the single aisle plane. You know, when you get on, there's just one aisle and typically three seats eat the side of that aisle. The 737 is the work horse of that narrowbody fleet. It's been around for decades. It's a highly regarded plane. There was an original version. They then developed what they called an NG, new generation version. If you fly on a 737 right now, almost certainly you're going to be on that one because there's many, many more of those in service at the moment than there are the MAX. In 2017, the first of the MAX versions, a new variant, entered service. Boeing has sold more than 5,000 of them, and there's about 350 MAXs in service,

and this particular variant is called the MAX 8. It's a very efficient aircraft. It's got new engines that are much more efficient with fuel. Obviously, that's important, both from a cost and an eco perspective. It's also much quieter, and it's got lower emissions. Do pilots need additional training to fly a MAX 8? How does that work exactly? Yes, the 737NG pilot would be your obvious pilot to transition to a MAX if you're bringing the MAX into the fleet. A lot of what Boeing did with this aircraft was to keep it very common with the 737NG, so that, you know, a lot of what a pilot would see, what a maintenance person would see, would be familiar to them from one aircraft to the other, but there would be specific training to anything that was new there.

What do pilots need to learn to fly the MAX 8 specifically? A software system that was brought in unique to the MAX in its design is something called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, MCAS. The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System. Yeah, MCAS. That is something they put in with the MAX, with the design and the new engines it's a heavier aircraft okay and so there was some shifts that they needed to do in terms of sort of balance and center of gravity and they introduced also this software that should the plane get into what they call a stall situation, which would be when the nose goes too high up. You'd have to go a long way up for that to happen.

But if it did, the plane essentially stops flying. Okay, so obviously you don't want that to happen. So this is an automated system that would kick in, trigger if did happen to bring the nose down so it takes control away from the pilot no i'm confused i don't know much about planes can you tell i'm not a pilot but it's very specific it's if the plane was in a what they call high angle of attack which is where the nose has gone way too high up yeah that could risk a stall. It would just automatically bring the nose down. So yes, it's an automated system, but there is a cutoff switch for the pilot to override it if that was the right action. Okay, so if I'm understanding this correctly, the MAX 8 has a

feature where if the nose of the plane is climbing too much, it will take control and some sort of autopilot function to bring the nose back down. To bring the nose down, yeah, to prevent a stall. But the pilot at any time can override that, yes. The automation. Yeah, and that's on all MAXs, yes. And that's not unusual? It's a new feature that they put onto the MAX. But certainly any pilot flying the MAX would know that there is this automation that could kick in and the pilot's capable of overriding it.

That's right, yes. So is there any potential that this could have been an issue in this crash or the earlier one in Indonesia? We have no indication at all at this stage that MCAS was a factor in the Ethiopian crash. In the Indonesian crash that happened in October, the MCAS is one of the things that they are looking at. If that's considered to be a factor, then they're going to also be asked a question, why didn't the pilot override the system? You know, why didn't the pilot override the system? You know, why didn't the cutoff switch happen? Boeing said in a statement late Monday evening that it would implement a software update to the MAX 8 in the coming weeks that is designed to, quote, make an already safe aircraft even

safer. And I just wonder, is that tantamount to saying they didn't make this plane as safe as they could have? You'd have to ask Boeing that, but it's not because their safety isn't their top priority. It is. We reached out to Boeing a bunch. They pointed us to a statement that says that, quote, safety is Boeing's number one priority,

and we have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX, end quote. But what we learned this week is that the rest of the world does not, including the United States. I'm Sean Ramos-Ferrum. That's next on Today Explained. Thank you. Well, you're going to hear about people like Tamara Malas. She was determined to go against typical industry standards of beauty. She poured her energy into creating what she finds beautiful, which ended up being this luxury plus clothing line. The pieces draw inspiration from fine art and design and popular culture and handcrafted textiles. Tamara was living the dream, working in high-end fashion,

but the body shaming and fat phobia of the industry was too much for her to bear. So she went out and did her own thing. And now there's a podcast about it from Canada's own Anshuman Edamseti. He is the host of Vanguard by Shopify Studios, and you can find Tamara's story and many others when you go find that podcast.

Check it out. Find Tamara's story and many others when you go find that podcast. Check it out. Andrew McIntosh, you report on aviation for the Puget Sound Business Journal in Seattle, Washington. How do the events of this week compare to what you've seen in the past with regard to plane crashes? I've never seen anything quite like it, and I don't think anyone else has. I mean, there was this divide between North America, Europe, and Asia and Africa about whether this airplane was safe going forward. And what the end result was is that travelers were left completely bewildered about whether they should be flying on this airplane or not. I wonder if you could help me kind of understand the chronology of what exactly happened this

week. So we know this plane crashed on Sunday. How long before countries are grounding their MAX 8s? It started the next morning. Ethiopia was the first. Then it was followed by some smaller players like the Grand Cayman Islands that had a couple of jets. And then it kind of mushroomed and snowballed from there. China was among the first major nations to ground the MAX. It is also the biggest buyer of that airplane. And so it cited an abundance of caution and similarities between the two accidents when sort of experts said, gee, it was really not clear at that time that they were two similar accidents.

They are also the makers of a rival airplane, the C919, that aspires to one day be a direct competitor with the Boeing 737. You had the UK jump in, and then you had Ireland, and then you had France not only ground the planes, but they banned them from their aerospace. And you saw more and more countries jumping in. And throughout, North America was this bastion. They said, no, no, no, we are not grounding. And so we had this kind of angry standoff between nations, which usually work together on aviation safety matters. And while the international community is figuring this out, there are also voices in North America calling for the 737s to be grounded, yeah?

Yes, there was a further divide there between some pilots and flight attendants. You had the head of the Southwest Airlines pilot union saying they thought that the MAX is safe to fly and they feel confident in its safety. And then a couple of hours later, you had two different flight attendants unions, including 75,000 men and women working for airlines, including American Airlines, one of the largest carriers, calling on the government and on the airlines to ground them for safety. This has really been a total breakdown in a failure of leadership and governance here. And we're very concerned about it. We're concerned about the fact that, in this case, America was last,

when in fact America has always been first. All this is like blasting away on Twitter and in news reports. But still, you know, Boeing came out with a very terse statement that day saying, we believe in the safety of the aircraft. The FAA is not grounding. There's no new information that we need to share with the operators of our airplanes to change the way they need to operate at this time. And it was like, wow, okay. We have, you know, two very different worlds saying very different things about it. And then yesterday you have Canada ground the flights at last. And then it seems like just a

few hours later, the president steps in and says, we're not going to fly these planes in the United States. What led to that decision? What led to that sort of game changer in this sequence of events? Well, both countries and Canada first said that they had received fresh satellite data tracking the movements of the airplane before its tragic plunge to the ground. And those movements showed movements that were similar to the movements of a Lion Air, a plane that also went down last October. But even then, in citing that data for their decision to ground, they said the data was not entirely conclusive. They wouldn't share the data

with anyone, but this new level of information from satellites just hurtling around the world gives the investigators new dimensions to any kind of air accident. Why did President Trump make the announcement instead of the FAA? Trump is the kind of guy who doesn't like people to be calling out the government for a lack of leadership, which is exactly what the 75,000 men and women flight attendants did. And there's another complicating factor is that the FAA has been without a permanent leader for the last little while. So I think he just decided that the government had taken enough of a pounding in the headlines

and the cable news, which he's a big consumer of, and just decided that if everyone else in the world was grounding the planes and there were 300 plus people dead after two crashes, that that was good enough for him. How much of the decision to ground the MAX 8, at least in the United States, where the plane is manufactured, was made due to political circumstances? And how much of it was made because we have to keep people safe and people are dying on these planes. You know, like, it sounds like there's just so much more involved here.

The FAA, which has a relationship with Boeing, obviously, the president, Boeing's the second biggest federal contractor, right? Like, China's trade relationship with the United States, China wanting to build its own planes and maybe not buy ours. Like there's just so much going on here. But at the end of the day, this should be about keeping people safe, right? That's right. The FAA, they keep people safe by working with data points and they work with facts.

And the facts were that since the MAX was introduced in North America in 2017, 2.8 million had flown it safely and 17,000 flights. So from their perspective, from a very cold-hearted scientific perspective, it didn't look like there was a problem. Now, after the first crash, the FAA did work with Boeing and they did issue an emergency airworthiness directive advising people about the problem that they think may have caused the first crash, which goes back to that software glitch. The MCAS. Yeah, the MCAS system. And they told pilots about it, and pilots throughout North America, at least, were taken aside and told,

if this happens while you're taking off, here's what you need to do. And it then became a sort of an awareness issue and a training issue. Were pilots outside North America given equal training on this software? Is there regional bias in training on these planes that are flown across the world? Well, I think it just speaks to the resources that airlines hear, which are massive. We have just a support network inside the airline. But some of these smaller airlines in the world that are newer as well and that have very young pilots, like the pilot on the Ethiopian Airlines plane was 29 years old and he was a captain.

Now he'd flown 8,000 hours and had been flying for years. But there still comes, I think, when you're flying an airplane, there's a certain amount of life experience that goes into that cockpit with you. So I think the situation is different. How long will this grounding last? What's next for this MAX 8 and Boeing? goes into that cockpit with you. So I think the situation is different. How long will this grounding last? What's next for this MAX 8 and Boeing? I'm told that it won't take too long. So it could be a matter of weeks. One of the issues that's going to emerge here is that usually the FAA is the go-to leader in aviation safety, but other agencies around the world clearly believe that the FAA

did not act quickly enough. And so they're going to be a little more wary and skeptical about any attempt to rush a software fix into an airplane until they themselves validate that it's going to work as well. And I mean, seeing how events played out this week, the sort of chaos in the United States aviation world about grounding these planes or keeping them in the sky, is this how the system's supposed to work? Did this shake your faith in how the system works at all? I just wonder, you know? I think the system worked really well.

Everybody, for the most part, got to where they were going. I did see booking sites like Kayak on the web program their software and their booking things so people could actually exclude flights with the MAX 8 from their choices when they were booking flights. So once you started giving the public the choice to fly it or not, you knew for sure what was going to happen and decisions are going to have to be made faster. I think that was the lesson of this week are going to have to be made faster. I think that was the lesson of this week. You know, those who made the decisions faster looked pretty good with the public who said, hey, this thing could be killing 300 people because of a software glitch. Ground it.

And so, you know, everybody's voice is getting heard in these kinds of crisis situations. And it was a crisis for the aviation industry and a crisis of reputation for Boeing. Thanks to Vanguard by Shopify Studios. It's a podcast that supported this podcast today. Every week, your host, Anshuman Dumsedi, takes you on a journey into an unexpected subculture, a community that you're not familiar with, where a small business is growing. New episodes every Wednesday. You can find it where you find your podcasts.