From nearly the moment they roared down the runway and took off in their new Boeing jetliner, pilots of an Ethiopian Airlines flight encountered problems with the plane.
Almost immediately, a device called a stick shaker began vibrating the captain's control column, warning him that the plane might be about to stall and fall from the sky.
The anti-stall system, called MCAS, automatically lowers the plane's nose under some circumstances to prevent an aerodynamic stall. Boeing acknowledged that a sensor in the Ethiopian Airlines jet malfunctioned, triggering MCAS when it was not needed. The company repeated that it is working on a software upgrade to fix the problem in its bestselling plane.
"It is clear now that the process itself failed to produce a safe aircraft," Hall said. "The focus now is to see if there were steps that were skipped or tests that were not properly done." Then the anti-stall system kicked in and pushed the nose of the plane down for nine seconds. Instead of climbing, the plane descended slightly. Audible warnings -- "Don't Sink" -- sounded in the cockpit. The pilots fought to turn the nose of the plane up, and briefly they were able to resume climbing.
Then they broke with Boeing procedure and returned power to controls including the anti-stall system, perhaps hoping to use power to adjust a tail surface that controls the pitch up or down of a plane, or maybe out of sheer desperation. The Max is Boeing's newest version of its workhorse single-aisle jetliner, the 737, which dates to the 1960s. Fewer than 400 Max jets have been sent to airlines around the world, but Boeing has taken orders for 4,600 more.
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