More than half a thousand fatalities leave the last accidents starring a Boeing 737, two of them Max.
Everyone has a common trigger: the planes rushed a few minutes after taking off.
The most recent tragedy occurred a few hours ago this Wednesday in an area near the urban center of Tehran leaving 176 fatalities (Another Boeing 737 crashes and 176 people die).
We go back to October 2018 in Jakarta, capital of Indonesia.
A Boeing 737 Max of the Lion Air airline with 189 people on board (181 passengers and eight crew members) takes off from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, located on the northwest coast of the island of Java, bound for Pangkal Pinang on the neighboring island of Bangka.
Thirteen minutes later, at 6.20 local time (00.20 Spanish time), the plane rushes into the Java Sea without leaving survivors.
His commander, with more than 6,000 flight hours, asked to return to the airport of origin a few minutes before disappearing from the radar.
This same device suffered technical problems during a flight the day before the fatal accident that, according to the authorities, were resolved before operating again (A Lion Air plane with 189 people on board crashes in Indonesia).
March 2019, Bole de Addis Ababa International Airport, capital of Ethiopia.
An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max with 157 people on board (149 passengers and eight crew members) takes off to Nairobi.
Six minutes later and after traveling 50 kilometers, it falls on the city of Bishoftu at 8.28 am local time.
His pilot warned minutes before the accident that he had trouble controlling the plane and requested an airstrip to return.
According to information from Flightradar24, the plane would have been struggling to maintain altitude for a while before the incident (Ethiopian Airlines: a plane crashes with 157 people).
Data from the black boxes of these planes revealed that the pilots struggled to maintain control of the devices before falling into a vacuum.
In the case of the Lion Air incident, the data indicated that the nose of the plane was pushed down more than thirty times during 11 minutes of flight.
In both cases, the pilots managed to correct the inclination again and again until they lost control of the devices (737 Max: “clear similarities” between the two catastrophes).
Two days after the Ethiopian Airlines accident and after contrasting the similarities with the Lion Air incident, the European Air Safety Agency (EASA) decided to close its airspace to the Boeing 737 Max and several countries began to ban its airlines from using it, among them the United States.
Following this decision, the US manufacturer said it assumed the withdrawal of its aircraft and would support the investigation of the accidents.
A year later, Boeing found the incident that could have prevented accidents.
It was an alarm installed in the cabin that warns of the failure of the ‘software’, but that none of the damaged aircraft had it because the manufacturer sold it as an extra.
Boeing warned that from that moment, it would install this alarm in the new 737 MAX aircraft and in the nearly 350 existing ones, but finally warn at the end of last year, that it would suspend its production (Boeing: the alarm that could have prevented accidents it was sold as an extra).
Almost two years after the last accident and even with the devices parked and the production of the Boeing 737 Max canceled, the investigations suggest that there could be more failures in this model (New blow for the 737 Max: Boeing investigates more failures).
His return is increasingly questioned and the manufacturer faces an unprecedented crisis in more than a century of history.
Now we can expect the discovery of the black boxes of the plane that just precipitated as soon as it took off in Tehran, another Boeing 737.
Source: Preferente
