Boeing said Sunday that it discovered after airlines had been flying its 737 Max plane for several months that a safety alert in the cockpit was not working as intended, yet it didn’t disclose that fact to airlines or federal regulators until after one of the planes crashed.
The feature was designed to warn pilots when a key sensor might be providing incorrect information about the pitch of the plane’s nose.
But within months of the plane’s debut in 2017, Boeing said, its engineers realized that the sensor warning light only worked when airlines also bought a separate, optional feature.
The sensors malfunctioned during an October flight in Indonesia and another in March in Ethiopia, causing software on the plane to push the nose down. Pilots were unable to regain control of either plane, and both crashed, killing 346 people.
It is not clear whether having the warning light would have prevented either the Lion Air crash or the March 10 crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Max near Addis Ababa. Boeing’s disclosure on Sunday, however, raised fresh questions about the company’s candor with regulators and airline customers.
Boeing said again that the plane was safe to fly without the sensor alert, called an angle-of-attack disagree light. Other gauges tell pilots enough about the plane’s speed, altitude, engine performance and other factors to fly safely, the company said.
A spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration said the agency was notified of the non-working warning light in November, after a Lion Air 737 Max crashed on Oct. 29 in Indonesia. He said FAA experts determined that the non-working cockpit indicator presented a low risk.
“However, Boeing’s timely or earlier communication with (airlines) would have helped to reduce or eliminate possible confusion,” the spokesman said in an emailed statement. He declined to give more details.
In manuals that Boeing gave to Southwest Airlines, the biggest operator of both the Max and 737s in general, the warning light was depicted as a standard feature just as it is on older 737s, according to Southwest spokeswoman Brandy King.
After the Lion Air crash, King said, Boeing notified Southwest that it had discovered the lights didn’t work without the optional angle-of-attack indicators, so Southwest began adding the optional feature too. That allowed the airline to activate the sensor-disagree warning lights on its 34 Max jets earlier this year, she said.
King described both features as “supplemental” and “advisory” to other information provided to pilots during flights.
The indicator was supposed to tell pilots when sensors that measure the pitch of the plane’s nose appear to conflict, a sign that the sensor information is unreliable. Boeing told airlines that the warning light was standard equipment on all Max jets.
Boeing engineers quickly learned, however, that the warning light only worked if airlines also bought an optional gauge that told pilots how the plane’s nose was aimed in relation to the onrushing air. Boeing said the problem stemmed from software delivered to the company. A Boeing spokesman declined to name the software vendor.
Boeing said Sunday that because in-house experts decided that the non-working light didn’t affect safety, the company decided to fix the problem by disconnecting the alert from the optional indicators at the next planned update of cockpit display software.
Boeing didn’t tell airlines or the FAA about this decision.
Boeing hopes to win approval from the FAA and foreign regulators to get the Max flying again before summer is over. When it does, the company said, the sensor warning light will be standard.
Nearly 400 Max jets were grounded at airlines worldwide in mid-March after the Ethiopia crash. Boeing is working to fix the software that pitched the planes’ noses down based on faulty sensor readings, and to provide pilots with more information about the plane’s automation.
The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into whether Boeing misled regulators about features on the plane including flight-control software at the heart of the crash investigations. The company is also under scrutiny by congressional committees and the Transportation Department’s inspector general, and it faces a growing number of lawsuits by families of the dead passengers.
Boeing did not tell airlines that safety alert wasn’t working
Boeing did not tell airlines that safety alert wasn’t working
- The feature was designed to warn pilots when a key sensor might be providing incorrect information about the pitch of the plane’s nose
- Boeing said again that the plane was safe to fly without the sensor alert, called an angle-of-attack disagree light
Afghan returnees in Bamiyan struggle despite new homes
- More than five million Afghans have returned home since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan: Sitting in his modest home beneath snow-dusted hills in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province, Nimatullah Rahesh expressed relief to have found somewhere to “live peacefully” after months of uncertainty.
Rahesh is one of millions of Afghans pushed out of Iran and Pakistan, but despite being given a brand new home in his native country, he and many of his recently returned compatriots are lacking even basic services.
“We no longer have the end-of-month stress about the rent,” he said after getting his house, which was financed by the UN refugee agency on land provided by the Taliban authorities.
Originally from a poor and mountainous district of Bamiyan, Rahesh worked for five years in construction in Iran, where his wife Marzia was a seamstress.
“The Iranians forced us to leave” in 2024 by “refusing to admit our son to school and asking us to pay an impossible sum to extend our documents,” he said.
More than five million Afghans have returned home since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), as neighboring Iran and Pakistan stepped up deportations.
The Rahesh family is among 30 to be given a 50-square-meter (540-square-foot) home in Bamiyan, with each household in the nascent community participating in the construction and being paid by UNHCR for their work.
The families, most of whom had lived in Iran, own the building and the land.
“That was crucial for us, because property rights give these people security,” said the UNHCR’s Amaia Lezertua.
Waiting for water
Despite the homes lacking running water and being far from shops, schools or hospitals, new resident Arefa Ibrahimi said she was happy “because this house is mine, even if all the basic facilities aren’t there.”
Ibrahimi, whose four children huddled around the stove in her spartan living room, is one of 10 single mothers living in the new community.
The 45-year-old said she feared ending up on the street after her husband left her.
She showed AFP journalists her two just-finished rooms and an empty hallway with a counter intended to serve as a kitchen.
“But there’s no bathroom,” she said. These new houses have only basic outdoor toilets, too small to add even a simple shower.
Ajay Singh, the UNHCR project manager, said the home design came from the local authorities, and families could build a bathroom themselves.
There is currently no piped water nor wells in the area, which is dubbed “the dry slope” (Jar-e-Khushk).
Ten liters of drinking water bought when a tanker truck passes every three days costs more than in the capital Kabul, residents said.
Fazil Omar Rahmani, the provincial head of the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation Affairs, said there were plans to expand the water supply network.
“But for now these families must secure their own supply,” he said.
Two hours on foot
The plots allocated by the government for the new neighborhood lie far from Bamiyan city, which is home to more than 70,000 people.
The city grabbed international attention in 2001, when the Sunni Pashtun Taliban authorities destroyed two large Buddha statues cherished by the predominantly Shia Hazara community in the region.
Since the Taliban government came back to power in 2021, around 7,000 Afghans have returned to Bamiyan according to Rahmani.
The new project provides housing for 174 of them. At its inauguration, resident Rahesh stood before his new neighbors and addressed their supporters.
“Thank you for the homes, we are grateful, but please don’t forget us for water, a school, clinics, the mobile network,” which is currently nonexistent, he said.
Rahmani, the ministry official, insisted there were plans to build schools and clinics.
“There is a direct order from our supreme leader,” Hibatullah Akhundzada, he said, without specifying when these projects will start.
In the meantime, to get to work at the market, Rahesh must walk for two hours along a rutted dirt road between barren mountains before he can catch a ride.
Only 11 percent of adults found full-time work after returning to Afghanistan, according to an IOM survey.
Ibrahimi, meanwhile, is contending with a four-kilometer (2.5-mile) walk to the nearest school when the winter break ends.
“I will have to wake my children very early, in the cold. I am worried,” she said.
