Report: Lion Air Crash Blamed on Design, Pilot Errors

Indonesian investigators have found that design and oversight mistakes played a central role in the crash of a Lion Air Boeng 737 MAX last year, The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported.

Source dpa, Hamburg, Germany (TNS)

Sept. 23, 2019

2 min read

Jakarta - Indonesian investigators have found that design and oversight mistakes played a central role in the crash of a Lion Air Boeng 737 MAX last year, The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported.

The aircraft plummeted into the sea 11 minutes after take-off from Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on October 29. Everyone on board was presumed dead.

The draft report into crash, which is expected to be relesed in mid-November, identified a series of pilot errors and maintenance mistakes as causal factors, the Journal said on Sunday.

The conclusions are consistent with a preliminary report released by Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) in November.

KNKT chairman Soerjanto Tjahjono declined to comment on the reported findings.

"We don't know who provided such information," he told dpa on Monday, adding that the final report was expected to be released in early or mid-November.

US investigators are preparing to release separate safety recommendations, ranging from bolstering the manual flying skills of pilots to enhancing Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) vetting of new aircraft designs, the Journal said.

The US National Transportation Safety Board is expected to call for improvements to cockpit training and crew decision making to ensure pilots know what to do when automated systems are malfunctioning or turned off, the newspaper said.

KNKT said in its preliminary report thay the pilot of the crashed Lion aircraft tried to pull the plane back up repeatedly as the aircraft's automatic nose-down manoeuvre was activated.

Crash investigators had looked into the role of a new feature in the Boeing aircraft, known as the manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system (MCAS), in the crash.

The system has been installed by Boeing on its latest generation of 737 to prevent the plane's nose from getting too high and causing the aircraft to stall.

But in the incident involving the Lion Air plane, it appeared to have forced the nose down after receiving erroneous information from sensors.

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