{"id":23194,"date":"2019-05-30T08:09:10","date_gmt":"2019-05-30T07:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mustaqbalradio.net\/?p=23194"},"modified":"2019-05-30T08:09:10","modified_gmt":"2019-05-30T07:09:10","slug":"ethiopian-pilot-pleaded-for-training-weeks-before-max-crash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/so\/ethiopian-pilot-pleaded-for-training-weeks-before-max-crash\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethiopian pilot pleaded for training weeks before Max crash"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Just days after a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max nosedived in Indonesia and killed all 189 people aboard, an Ethiopian Airlines pilot began pleading with his bosses for more training on the Max, warning that crews could easily be overwhelmed in a crisis and that one of their planes could be the next to go down.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are asking for trouble,\u201d veteran pilot Bernd Kai von Hoesslin wrote in a December email obtained by The Associated Press, adding that if several alarms go off in the cockpit at once, \u201cit will be a crash for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That prediction proved all too accurate.<\/p>\n<p>What Ethiopian Airlines did in response to his warnings is unclear, and whether it made any difference is a matter of dispute. But within weeks, an Ethiopian Max indeed went down, killing all 157 people on board. It slammed into the ground amid a flurry of alarms as the pilots struggled to control a malfunction in the automatic anti-stall system.<\/p>\n<div class=\"inline-ad\">\n<div>Ads By Google<\/div>\n<p><ins id=\"aswift_2_expand\" data-ad-slot=\"6298317916\"><ins id=\"aswift_2_anchor\"><iframe id=\"aswift_2\" name=\"aswift_2\" width=\"300\" height=\"250\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/ins><\/ins><\/div>\n<p>While the anti-stall system has gotten most of the scrutiny in the two Max crashes five months apart that have led to a worldwide grounding of the planes, the concerns raised by von Hoesslin have added to a debate on the role pilot error played, and whether Ethiopian\u2019s pilots were as prepared as they could have been to avert disaster.<\/p>\n<p>Von Hoesslin, a Canadian citizen who resigned from Ethiopian last month, argued in three emails to senior managers after the anti-stall system came under scrutiny in the Lion Air crash that crews flying Ethiopian\u2019s five Max jets should have been given more information and training on how the system worked. He also said pilots should be drilled on the steps to override it if it faltered. Von Hoesslin\u2019s emails were first reported by Bloomberg.<\/p>\n<p>The Max\u2019s system, called MCAS, for Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, automatically pushes the plane\u2019s nose down when it is at risk of stalling. It misfired in both fatal crashes, with pilots losing control of the plane as they fought against it.<\/p>\n<p>According to the email chain obtained by the AP, Ethiopian responded to the Oct. 29 Lion Air crash with a few emails to pilots detailing bulletins from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing on what do if the anti-stall system malfunctioned. Other Ethiopian pilots who spoke to the AP say those emails required no signoffs that pilots actually read and understood the directives, and no mandated additional training.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEthiopian Airlines is a rapidly expanding airline and they have extremely inexperienced crews,\u201d von Hoesslin said in documents obtained by the AP. \u201cYou need to spoon-feed them the information and make sure they understand.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To underscore his point, von Hoesslin made a video shortly after the Ethiopian crash in which he quizzed a Max pilot on a Boeing list of warning signs on the stall system that crew members were required to commit to memory. That video, obtained by AP, shows him going blank on most of it.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou have to have confirmation that they opened it, that they read it and that they understood it,\u201d von Hoesslin said in a document obtained by the AP. \u201cThey should have done a little online test with 10 questions. You don\u2019t pass until you get the 10 questions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ethiopian Airlines tweeted Wednesday that \u201cthe source of these false allegations is a disgruntled former employee &#8230; who has left the airline after many administrative problems.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Von Hoesslin\u2019s lawyer, Darryl Levitt, issued a statement saying the pilot was not fired but \u201cresigned due to legitimate concerns he had raised that he felt were not adequately addressed.\u201d He added that von Hoesslin will be cooperating with regulators and authorities \u201cwith his sole objective of contributing to make air travel safe.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ethiopian has said that the requirements for warning and training Max pilots after the Lion Air crash were set by the FAA and Boeing and that their directives were used to \u201cbrief all our pilots\u201d and incorporated into flight manuals.<\/p>\n<p>CEO Tewolde Gebremariam said in an interview shortly after the Ethiopian crash, \u201cToday we believe that might not have been enough.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Gebremariam declined to say whether the pilots on the doomed flight took additional training after the Lion Air crash on Ethiopian\u2019s Max simulator, a multimillion-dollar piece of equipment most airlines don\u2019t have, but said \u201cit wouldn\u2019t have made any difference\u201d because the simulator wasn\u2019t designed to imitate problems in the new jet\u2019s flight-control system.<\/p>\n<p>Ethiopian has said both the captain and co-pilot followed all the steps Boeing laid out in its bulletin on how to respond to a malfunction in the anti-stall system.<\/p>\n<p>But the preliminary report on the March 10 crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 from Addis Ababa to Nairobi showed that the pilots deviated from the directives and made other mistakes, notably flying the plane at an unusually high speed and inexplicably reactivating the anti-stall system shortly after manually overriding it.<\/p>\n<p>Six minutes into its flight, the plane with passengers from nearly a dozen countries cratered into the ground about 40 miles from the airport.<\/p>\n<p>Former FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt said the Ethiopian pilots clearly bear some of the blame.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo Boeing was at fault because a light came on or this thing tripped mistakenly, but it shouldn\u2019t have brought the airplane down,\u201d Babbitt said of the anti-stall system. \u201cThat was very fixable and a pretty simple solution. And they didn\u2019t come to grips with it. &#8230; They let the plane get away from them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Peter Lemme, a former Boeing engineer who worked on flight control systems, said apportioning blame between Boeing and the crew is difficult.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSome pilots in their easy chairs are saying they would have known how to react, but it\u2019s not so easy,\u201d he said. \u201cDid the pilots cause the accident? No. Could they have prevented it? Yes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Von Hoesslin, a 56-year-old pilot with three decades of flying experience, initially wrote to his bosses Nov. 11 in response to the airline\u2019s five-sentence email to dozens of pilots alerting them to the Boeing bulletin and reminding them about the checklist of steps to perform should something similar go wrong.<\/p>\n<p>He urged Ethiopian to give more information because pilots are not \u201cfully or even aware of how\u201d the MCAS works. That prompted a second email from the airline with more detail.<\/p>\n<p>A month later, on Dec. 12, von Hoesslin sent another email, urging a close reading of a preliminary report from Indonesian regulators on the crash there. He pointed out several potential problems with the Max and recommended steps be taken to make sure pilots know the checklist.<\/p>\n<p>The next day, he sent a third email recommending new simulator training designed to roughly re-create what went wrong in the Indonesian flight, adding that he had already practiced in a simulator rigged in such a way and his experience with all the alarms going off was frightening.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThrow in a GPWS PULL UP\u201d \u2014 a warning to pilots that the plane is in danger of crashing into the ground \u2014 \u201cand it would be a crash for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Boeing has said that its fix to software on the Max\u2019s anti-stall system will be accompanied by additional training for pilots. The acting chief of the FAA, Daniel Elwell, said last week that his agency hasn\u2019t decided whether that training should be conducted on computers or in flight simulators.<\/p>\n<p>___<\/p>\n<p>AP writer David Koenig in Dallas and researchers Jennifer Farrar, Randy Herschaft and Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Just days after a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max nosedived in Indonesia and killed all 189 people aboard, an Ethiopian Airlines pilot began pleading with his bosses for more training on the Max, warning that crews could easily be overwhelmed in a crisis and that one of their planes could be&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23196,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/so\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23194"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/so\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/so\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/so\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/so\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/so\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/so\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/so\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/so\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/so\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}