Ethiopia blames design, training problems in Boeing 737 MAX crash

Faulty aircraft design and inadequate pilot-training recommendations from the manufacturer led to the fatal crash of a Boeing 737 MAX jet after takeoff from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia a year ago, according to an accident report issued by Ethiopian investigators. The interim report released Monday about the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 provides some new technical analyses along with details about the cockpit drama before the plunge—with pilots pulling back on the controls with more than 180 pounds of force to no avail. But the document indicates that neither pilot errors nor potential airline slip-ups contributed significantly to the tragedy that killed all 157 on board. The findings contrast with a series of other government and industry reports that highlighted the important interplay of causal factors, ranging from Boeing’s misguided engineering assumptions to lax regulatory oversight to at least one significant incorrect pilot command. Monday’s report gives short shrift to such contributing causes and focuses largely on Boeing’s failings in devising a powerful new automated flight-control feature, called MCAS. That feature, which ended up aggressively and repeatedly pushing down the nose of the Ethiopian airliner, is being fixed before the global MAX fleet returns to service.<br/>