The 737 Max Crisis

In the realm of aviation, safety stands as an absolute imperative. The tragic crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302, occurring within mere months of each other, are stark reminders of the dire consequences when a firm's priority of profit is above everything else. These two incidents involved none other than the notorious Boeing 737 Max, a symbol of the jeopardies associated with compromising safety for financial games.

Before the inception of the 737 Max, Boeing and Airbus engaged in fierce competition to secure airline orders, each striving to produce superior, more fuel-efficient, and cost-effective aircraft for airline operations. In this race, Boeing re-engineered one of their most highly regarded aircraft series, the 737, incorporating enhanced avionics, aerodynamics, and more fuel-efficient engines like the LEAP-1B engine, resulting in a 15-20% boost in fuel efficiency compared to its predecessor. The larger engines were situated further forward and upward, causing the aircraft to exhibit a propensity (tendency) to pitch up during certain phases of flight.

In response, Boeing introduced the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), designed to automatically adjust the aircraft's angle of attack to prevent a stall from happening. Nevertheless, the airlines were not informed of the newly installed system, causing the system's exclusion from the pilots' training. The system repeatedly caused nose-down commands, catching the flight crews off guard as they attempted to diagnose the problem and override the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). Ultimately, the repeated nose-down commands from the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), combined with the crews' inability to counteract the system effectively, led to a loss of control of the aircraft in both accidents, having entered steep descents that were difficult to recover at low altitudes, resulting in crashes shortly after takeoff.

On October 29, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610, a Boeing 737 Max, was flying from Jakarta to Pangkalpinang. The flight began uneventfully but tragically vanished from radar screens shortly after takeoff, later confirmed to have crashed 34 kilometres off the coast of Java, claiming the lives of all 189 individuals on board. The world mourned this loss, but the anguish deepened less than five months later, on March 10, 2019, when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 met a similar fate, plummeting into the ground shortly after takeoff. The combined loss of 346 lives in both crashes raised suspicious doubts about the safety of the aircraft.