Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302

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Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302
Ethiopian Airlines ET-AVJ takeoff from TLV (46461974574) retusche.jpg

The plane a month before the accident
Accident summary
Accident type Wil be inspected
place near Boccan, Ethiopia
date March 10, 2019
Fatalities 157
Survivors 0
Aircraft
Aircraft type Boeing 737 MAX 8
operator Ethiopian Airlines
Mark ET-AVJ
Departure airport EthiopiaEthiopia Addis Ababa Airport
Destination airport KenyaKenya Jomo Kenyatta International Airport
Passengers 149
crew 8th
Lists of aviation accidents
Planned route of flight ET302; ADD refers to Addis Ababa Airport, NBO refers to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi

Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 was a scheduled flight of Ethiopian Airlines from Addis Ababa Airport in Ethiopia to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi ( Kenya ), on which a Boeing 737 MAX 8 shortly after take-off east of the city on the morning of March 10, 2019 Bishoftu , where Boccan village crashed. All 149 passengers and 8 crew members were killed. It is the worst incident in the history of Ethiopian Airlines and at the same time the plane crash with the most casualties in Ethiopia by far.

In response to the accident, all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft were banned from flying (grounding) worldwide until March 13, 2019 .

Airplane and flight number

The Boeing 737 MAX 8 with the serial number 62450, serial number 7243 and the registration ET-AVJ had its maiden flight on October 30, 2018 and was delivered to Ethiopian Airlines in November 2018. On February 4, 2019, Ethiopian Airlines said it was subjected to a "strict first control maintenance". It was part of the new MAX series of the Boeing 737, the worldwide delivery of which began on May 22, 2017. The aircraft of this version are equipped with two CFM Leap-1B engines.

The flight carried flight number ET302 or ETH302 as well as the additional codeshare flight numbers AI7574 when flying with Air India , KP1006 with Asky Airlines , KU6302 with Kuwait Airways and SQ6076 with Singapore Airlines .

the accident

The duration of the planned flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi should be two hours. The aircraft took off at 8:38 a.m. EAT (05:38 UTC ) from the 7,625 ft (2,324 m) high airport and was at an altitude of 9,000 ft (approx. 2,700 m) above sea level (but only approx. 400 m over the departure airport) when radio contact was broken at 08:44 EAT (05:44 UTC). One of the pilots had previously reported “problems” and asked for permission to return. ADS data from the Flightradar24 service shows that the vertical speed of the machine was unstable after taking off. In the first three minutes of the flight she fluctuated between a rate of climb of 1,472 ft / min (8 m / s) and a descent rate of 1,920 ft / min (10 m / s), which is very unusual for a climb phase. While the vertical speed fluctuated ten times within the first three minutes, the airspeed increased steadily and at an altitude of 8,600 ft (approx. 2,600 m) above sea level was more than 400 kn (approx. 740 km / h), which is well above the maximum speed allowed for such a low altitude.

The crash site is about 62 km southeast of Addis Ababa Airport. There were no survivors. The first pictures of the accident site showed a large crater and only small pieces of debris. This indicates an impact from a vertical attitude and at high speed.

A defective angle of attack sensor is suspected to be the cause. The error meant that the MCAS system mistakenly an impending stall accepted and the aircraft steered several times towards the floor. The system only evaluates one of the two angle of attack sensors. If this is defective or disrupted, this can lead to incorrect MCAS activation.

Crew and passengers

Passengers
Country of origin number
KenyaKenya Kenya 32
CanadaCanada Canada 18th
EthiopiaEthiopia Ethiopia 09
ItalyItaly Italy 08th
United StatesUnited States United States 08th
China People's RepublicPeople's Republic of China People's Republic of China 08 1
FranceFrance France 07th
United KingdomUnited Kingdom United Kingdom 07th
EgyptEgypt Egypt 06th
GermanyGermany Germany 05
IndiaIndia India 04th
SlovakiaSlovakia Slovakia 04th
AustriaAustria Austria 03
RussiaRussia Russia 03
SwedenSweden Sweden 03
SpainSpain Spain 02
IsraelIsrael Israel 02
MoroccoMorocco Morocco 02
PolandPoland Poland 02
BelgiumBelgium Belgium 01
DjiboutiDjibouti Djibouti 01
IndonesiaIndonesia Indonesia 01
IrelandIreland Ireland 01
YemenYemen Yemen 01
MozambiqueMozambique Mozambique 01
NepalNepal Nepal 01
NigeriaNigeria Nigeria 01
NorwayNorway Norway 01
RwandaRwanda Rwanda 01
Saudi ArabiaSaudi Arabia Saudi Arabia 01
SerbiaSerbia Serbia 01
SomaliaSomalia Somalia 01
SudanSudan Sudan 01
TogoTogo Togo 01
UgandaUganda Uganda 01
total 149

The flying performance of the 29-year-old flight captain, who has more than 8,000 hours of flight experience, was described as “worthy of recognition”. The first officer had 200 hours of flight experience.

Eight crew members and 149 passengers from 35 nations were on board the aircraft. One passenger was traveling with a United Nations Laissez-passer (UN) passport . The diversity of nationalities is explained by the international importance of the two cities: Addis Ababa is the seat of the African Union and numerous other international organizations, and Nairobi is the African seat of the United Nations.

Among the passengers were people who wanted to attend a conference of the United Nations Environment Program in Nairobi. Seven employees of the United Nations World Food Program were in the machine. The development cooperation organization Save the Children commemorated an employee who was killed in the crash on its website. Among the dead were Pius Adesanmi , a well-known Canadian-Nigerian writer, Italian archaeologist and politician Sebastiano Tusa , who at the time of the accident was Regional Minister of Cultural Heritage of the Autonomous Region of Sicily , Somali diplomat Abdishakur Shahad , and Kenyan journalist Anthony Ngare , Canadian botanist, environmentalist and Chair of the International Family Forestry Alliance Peter deMarsh, Calgary Councilor and Pastor Derick Lwugi, Nigerian Ambassador to Ethiopia and Diplomat of the African Union Abiodun Bashua, British environmental activist Joanna Toole, Franco-Norwegian environmental activist and Polar tourism expert Sarah Auffret, the Togolese botanist Glato Kodjo and the wife and two children of the Slovak politician Anton Hrnko . The Confédération Africaine de Football confirmed that its Commissioner Hussein Swaleh Mtetu was among the victims of the crash.

context

A plane of the same type crashed on Lion Air Flight 610 in Indonesia on October 29, 2018 . The manufacturing company Boeing said in a Twitter message that it is "closely monitoring the situation".

Ethiopian Airlines is the largest airline in Africa. The last two personal injury accidents at Ethiopian Airlines were the crash of a Boeing 737 on Ethiopian Airlines flight 409 near Beirut on January 25, 2010 and the hijacked accident of a Boeing 767 on Ethiopian Airlines flight 961 near the Comoros on November 23, 1996.

With 157 deaths, the accident clearly exceeds the severity of the most serious accident in Ethiopia to date, the crash of an Antonov An-26 of the Ethiopian Air Force with 73 deaths on January 14, 1982.

It is the third worst accident ever to a Boeing 737, after the accidents on Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 with 189 fatalities and Air India Express Flight 812 in 2010 with 158 fatalities.

Reactions

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Immediately after the accident, there were numerous expressions of condolences. The Ethiopian parliament declared state mourning on Monday, March 11, 2019.

On March 11, 2019, the American Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) announced that an official instruction should be issued by April 2019 at the latest , which requires the manufacturer Boeing to make changes to the MCAS (a system that is intended to prevent critical flight situations).

On the afternoon of March 12, 2019, Boeing issued a press release in which the company stated that safety was a top priority and that it sympathized with aircraft customers and authorities for making decisions they believed appropriate regarding their home markets. Boeing said it still has complete confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX and will continue to work with all parties involved to provide them with all the information they need to keep their fleets running smoothly. The FAA is currently not ordering any action, and on the basis of the information currently available, there is no reason to re-issue operators of the affected machines.

Under the pressure of the international operating bans for the 737 MAX and demands for an operating ban by several politicians and trade unions in the USA, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao and her cabinet employees traveled from Austin , Texas to Washington, DC and demonstratively booked a flight connection with a Boeing 737 MAX 8 of Southwest Airlines was carried out. At a press conference in Washington, she said that "the Department and the Federal Aviation Administration will not hesitate to take immediate and appropriate action" should it emerge that the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft have a safety-related defect. With this, Chao repeated the wording of a statement by FAA Chairman Daniel K. Elkwell from the previous evening.

On March 15, 2019, Boeing announced that delivery of the 737 MAX types would be suspended until further notice. However, production is to continue and capacities are to be re-evaluated.

On March 22, 2019, Garuda Indonesia became the first airline worldwide to cancel Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft due to the crashes. The airline announced that it wanted to cancel 49 machines. The airline placed the order for 50 machines in 2014; at the time of the cancellation, one of the machines had been delivered.

Operating bans and discontinuations

Operating bans by country:
red : declared by authorities
yellow : only declared by airlines

Due to the similarity with the crash on Lion Air flight 610 a few months earlier, so many airlines and states issued a take-off ban between March 11 and 13, 2019 that this was in fact a worldwide flight ban (English: grounding) for the Boeing 737 MAX complied. The beginning was made by the CAAC , which issued an operating ban for the Boeing “737-8” aircraft. Some airlines stuck to the Boeing 737, or, such as B. SpiceJet , stated that they would continue to operate the Boeing 737 MAX with additional safety measures for the time being, but this became obsolete only a few hours later due to national flight bans.

The entire airspace of the European Union was closed by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft, the date of entry into force of the order was set for March 12, 2019, 7 p.m. UTC . At this time, some national flight bans had already been issued, including in Germany and Austria . In the European Union, commercial flights by all airlines, regardless of the place of entry, and in principle all flights of European 737-MAX versions are prohibited. Switzerland also joined the ban .

The USA joined the wave of bans on the evening of March 13, 2019. Several airlines in the USA had previously given assurances that they would continue to have confidence in their aircraft. As the last airline in the world, Copa Airlines from Panama announced the decommissioning of its Boeing 737 MAX fleet on the evening of March 13, 2019.

Aircraft accident investigation

The Ethiopian Civil Aviation Authority (ECAA) is responsible for investigating aircraft accidents on Ethiopian territory . As representatives of the "State of Manufacture" according to ICAO Annex 13, the two US authorities NTSB (National Authority for Transport Safety ) and FAA (Aviation Authority ) are participating in the investigation. The NTSB announced that it would send four investigators to Ethiopia to investigate the crash.

The flight data recorder (FDR) and voice recorder (CVR) were recovered on March 11, 2019. Ethiopian Airlines stipulated that the data analysis had to be carried out in a European country. The two black boxes were therefore handed over to the French investigation authority for aircraft accidents BEA for evaluation . The authority announced that the flight recorders were in good condition and had enabled "almost all of the data recorded" to be evaluated. When examining the recorder, similarities between this accident and the accident on the Lion Air flight were found. The investigation of these "clear similarities" is still ongoing.

On March 14, 2019, FAA Chairman Dan Elwell said he had concluded "there is a safety-related hazard in commercial aviation." He predicted that the investigations and improvements would lead to a machine downtime for months. Elwell was referring to improved satellite data from the previous day and physical evidence on the ground showing great similarities between the crash of the two Boeing 737 MAX 8s on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and Lion Air Flight 610 . In particular, after the discovery of the threaded spindle and associated nut for the trim setting of the horizontal stabilizer, it was found that they were in the end position, for trimming for a steep descent, and thus in the same setting as in the accident with the Lion-Air 610 .

Preliminary report

On April 5, 2019, the ECAA published a preliminary report. The summary states that shortly after take-off, the value of the aircraft's angle of attack was incorrectly recorded by the sensor. In addition, different sensors for airspeed and altitude provided different values. The pilots have therefore followed, among other things, the work instructions recommended by Boeing as a result of the Lion Air crash, but this was not sufficient to stabilize the flight situation. As can be seen from the recordings in the black box, the crew made further control inputs despite the automatic trim being switched off and ultimately lost control of the aircraft.

NTSB opinion

On September 26, 2019, Robert L. Sumwalt , pilot and chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) since 2017, strongly criticized Boeing and the FAA. The designer and the supervisory authority made unrealistic assumptions about the reaction of the pilots to problems run out of the MCAS system. Investigators demanded from Boeing and the FAA that they had to use appropriate methods to ensure that system errors can be correctly identified by the flight crew in order to initiate appropriate reactions

Remarks

1including a resident of Hong KongHong KongHong Kong 

Individual evidence

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Coordinates: 8 ° 52 ′ 38 "  N , 39 ° 15 ′ 4"  E