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.
“We are asking for trouble,” 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, “it will be a crash for sure.”
That prediction proved all too accurate.
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.
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’s pilots were as prepared as they could have been to avert disaster.
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’s 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’s emails were first reported by Bloomberg.
The Max’s system, called MCAS, for Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, automatically pushes the plane’s 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.
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.
“Ethiopian Airlines is a rapidly expanding airline and they have extremely inexperienced crews,” von Hoesslin said in documents obtained by the AP. “You need to spoon-feed them the information and make sure they understand.”
