Lion Air crash investigators looking at two American companies associated with Boeing 737 Max sensor

Aviation investigators are looking into two American companies that handled the sensor at the center of the Lion Air crash last year, according to multiple sources familiar with the case. The sensor, a vane located on the front of the Boeing 737 Max model known as the angle-of-attack (AoA) sensor, fed incorrect data to the flight control system of the Lion Air plane, activating an anti-stall software on the aircraft that repeatedly pitched the plane downward before its crash into the Java Sea, killing 189 people, Indonesian authorities have said. On Thursday, Ethiopian aviation authorities said that one of the AoA sensors on board the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed last month was also producing faulty data, activating the same automatic flight control system that pilots battled before that plane's crash, which killed 157 people. The Indonesian and Ethiopian investigators have only both released preliminary reports, and they do not specify a cause for the crashes. The sensor on the Lion Air flight had been repaired by Xtra Aerospace, a company in Miramar, Florida, in 2017, before it was returned to Lion Air and later installed on the doomed flight, according to Nurcahyo Utomo, an investigator with Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee. The part sat in storage with the airline until it was put on the Lion Air plane the day before it crashed, Utomo said. The US National Transportation Safety Board, which is assisting Indonesian authorities in the Lion Air investigation, is looking into work done on the sensor at the company in the aftermath of the crash at the request of the Indonesian aviation authority, according to Utomo.<br/>