Boeing 737 800 Indonesia causes of crash. How does a person die in a plane crash, and are passengers told that the plane is crashing? "Any bug in the software can only make the situation worse"

Boeing 737 MAX 8 of the national carrier Ethiopian Airlines. 157 people died, three of them Russians.

This disaster jeopardized contracts already signed by Boeing for the supply of aircraft of this series, which became the best-selling aircraft in the history of the aircraft concern.

Boeing 737 MAX has been flying for less than two years

The Boeing 737 MAX 8 belongs to the latest generation of the Boeing 737 MAX (there are also MAX 7, 9 and 10). This is a medium-haul airliner designed for 162-210 passengers and capable of covering a distance of up to 6570 km.

Expert opinion

While some foreign experts are calling for a refusal to fly the Boeing 737 MAX 8 until the circumstances of the crash in Ethiopia are clarified, others believe that there is no need to rush into decisions and should wait for the official results of the investigation.

Russian experts interviewed by TASS are also confident that first of all we need to wait for official conclusions.

According to aviation expert Vladimir Karnozov, the hype will calm down within one to two months and is unlikely to have long-term consequences. But not because of any positive results of the investigation, but because of the unique duopoly of Airbus and Boeing that has developed in the market. “If Boeing encounters difficulties, then Airbus will take the lead, which will have an increased workload because of this (which means the queue for new aircraft will increase - TASS note). And when the “dust” settles down after the disaster in Ethiopia, airlines will start buying again Boeing, simply because it will have less waiting time for the delivery of aircraft,” the analyst emphasized. Indeed, production of the Airbus A320neo, which remains the main competitor to the Boeing 737 MAX, is scheduled for the next decade.

And although the current situation threatens orders for Boeing 737 MAX models totaling more than $600 billion, Bloomberg experts do not see any risks of a long-term crisis. In their opinion, Boeing will be helped to survive by the upcoming software update, which is designed to solve the problem.

Market participants also explained the sharp reaction of the world community by the photographic similarity of two disasters - in Indonesia and Ethiopia. But only an official commission can confirm or refute it, experts emphasized.

Now the question is whether Boeing will be able to quickly respond to what happened, said Sergei Melnichenko, General Director of the International Consulting and Analytical Agency Flight Safety. Especially considering that there are no official results from the investigation into the tragedy in Indonesia yet. For Boeing, the crashes of its airliners mean enormous costs even at the investigation stage, not to mention the option if the company is ultimately found guilty of the tragedies.

For example, the Norwegian airline, forced to stop operating 18 of its Eights, billed Boeing for this.

Is it very typical for Russian planes to fall from Ukrainian missiles? Have you already counted a lot?

It sounds blasphemous to mention a Ukrainian missile after such events:

1 Malaysian Boeing, hit by a beech tree (the report of the Dutch prosecutor's office proves this irrefutably)

2 On the night of June 14, 2014, a military transport aircraft of the Ukrainian Air Force Il-76 was shot down by a shot from an anti-aircraft missile system and a long burst from a heavy machine gun while landing at the airfield in Lugansk. There were 40 Ukrainian military personnel and 9 crew members on board the Il-76. They all died. This feat was celebrated Wagnerians, who were in Ukraine at that time. The Ukrainian special service has documentary information that part of the “Wagnerites” fired at the Lugansk airport almost every day in the summer of 2014.

What if we remember history?

September 1, 1983, in the sky above Pacific Ocean a tragedy occurred, which some Russian sources bashfully call an “incident” to this day: a Soviet air defense fighter shot down a South Korean civilian airliner that violated the air border of the USSR. All 269 people on board, including 23 children, were killed.

Boeing 707 crash in Karel II

Everyone is now hearing about the crash of the Malaysian Boeing over the Donbass. Less known, but nevertheless known about it, is the story of how a South Korean Boeing was shot down over the Soviet Far East on September 1, 1983. It turns out that this is not the first South Korean Boeing shot down over the Soviet Union. There was one more.

April 20, 1978 in the area Kola Peninsula another South Korean Boeing 707 was shot down over the territory of the USSR, flying on the route Paris - Anchorage - Seoul
On April 20, 1978, in the area of the Kola Peninsula, the USSR border was crossed by a diverted passenger Boeing-707-321B (HL7429) of Korean Air Lines (KAL), operating flight 902 - Paris-Anchorage-Seoul.
The Korean Boeing continued to fly towards Severomorsk. Dmitry Tsarkov, who in 1978 held the position of commander of the 21st Air Defense Corps of the USSR, reports to Vladimir Dmitriev, who at that time held the position of commander of the 10th Air Defense Army of the USSR, that the air defense is ready to shoot down the intruder. Dmitriev did not give permission, saying that we could shoot down our plane; the exact identity of the plane was not yet clear. The offender was walking at a speed of 15 kilometers per minute (900 km/h). At this time, the intruder crossed the border of the USSR. A flight of fighters was lifted into the sky.
The plane was detected by Soviet air defense radars and initially identified as a Boeing 747. The anti-aircraft missile system was put on alert. A Su-15TM fighter ("Flegon-F") under the control of Captain A. Bosov was sent to intercept.

According to the testimony of the captain of the airliner, Kim Chang Ki, the interceptor approached his plane from the right side (and not from the left, as required by the rules of the international organization civil aviation- ICAO). The captain states that he reduced his speed and turned on his navigation lights, indicating that he was ready to follow the Soviet fighter for landing. Attempts by Captain Kim Chang Kee to contact the interceptor pilot on frequency 121.5 were detected by the air traffic control tower in Rovaniemi, Finland. According to the official statement of the Soviet side, the airliner evaded the requirement to land. When the interceptor pilot reported that the intruder was in fact not a 747, but a Boeing 707, the command decided that it was an RC-135 electronic reconnaissance aircraft (produced on the basis of the Boeing 707 airliner) and gave the order to destroy goals.

According to American radio intercepts, the interceptor pilot tried for several minutes to convince the command to cancel the order, because he saw the KAL airline emblem on the airliner and inscriptions in hieroglyphs, however, after confirming the order, he fired two P-60 missiles at the liner. The first of them missed the target, and the second exploded, tearing off part of the left wing, causing depressurization of the aircraft and killing two passengers with fragments.

Due to depressurization of the cabin, the airliner began an emergency descent and disappeared from the radar screens of the Soviet air defense system. The interceptor pilot also lost the damaged airliner in the clouds.

Over the next hour, emergency flight 902 flew at low altitude across the entire Kola Peninsula, looking for a place for an emergency landing and, after several unsuccessful attempts, landed in the gathering dusk on the ice of Lake Korpiyarvi, already on the territory of Karelia. Throughout this entire time, the air defense had no information about the fate and location of the aircraft.

The USSR refused to cooperate in the investigation of this incident with international experts and did not provide data from the black boxes seized from the plane. The plane itself was dismantled and removed in parts. The Korean airline refused it so as not to pay for the evacuation of the plane. 95 passengers were taken to Kem, and then to Murmansk airport. On April 23, 1978, they were handed over to representatives of the US Consulate General in Leningrad and Pan American Airlines and sent to Helsinki. Su-15 pilot Captain A. Bosov was awarded the Order of the Red Star for completing a combat mission.

The Boeing commander, the highest-class pilot Lee Chang Hui, a former military pilot, managed to land a barely controllable 200-ton aircraft on a frozen lake. This saved the lives of the remaining passengers. The Boeing commander was later questioned. He said that he fought as a fighter pilot back in Vietnam. Finished fighting with the rank of colonel. Then he worked for 10 years in a civil airline, and also had 10 years of experience flying along the route of flight 902. He has been flying with this crew for 7 years. The last flight before this flight on this route was a week ago. The weather during the flight was good. When asked how you could have gone so off course, the commander replied that the navigation equipment had allegedly failed.

Years later, a flight map of Flight 902 was released based on declassified black box data, showing that the plane began a smooth, wide right turn shortly after reaching Iceland on the Amsterdam-Anchorage leg. This turn was too smooth to be done by hand, and The only explanation can be a malfunction of the navigation equipment.

Death selfie. It shows frightened Boeing 737 passengers wearing oxygen masks. Later it will become known that there were, according to various sources, from 185 to 189 people on board. The airliner disappeared from radar 10 minutes after takeoff. There were no survivors; all passengers on the Boeing 737 were killed. A dry official report is all that is known about the Indonesian tragedy.

There are still more questions than answers. And the main one: what happened to the airliner, whose flight from Jakarta to Sumatra was interrupted in the Java Sea?

Read also:

Possible terrorist attack: Fuel tank of plane crashed in Indonesia found with traces of explosion None of the passengers and crew members of the Lion Air Boeing 737 that crashed into the Java Sea survived.

Later, specialists from the Interstate Aviation Committee came to the conclusion that the crash was caused by incorrect flight speed data that the crew received. There were other aircraft accidents that miraculously did not result in loss of life. Honored pilot of the USSR Oleg Smirnov recalled them: “This year is unsuccessful for us. And we have a disaster, and very serious incidents in Sochi and Yakutia. These are events that only by chance did not end in tragedy. We were lucky both in Sochi and in Yakutia - the planes were destroyed, and all the passengers, fortunately, were alive. I hope that these events will force our government agencies to take aviation security issues seriously.”

Government agencies have something to pay close attention to. Almost all aircraft of domestic airlines are registered not in Russia, but in Bermuda. Moreover, it is Bermuda that approves Russian pilots for work.

Told about this flight director Utair airlines Andrey Sitnyansky : “If you fly on an airplane, pay attention to the tail number. It usually says VP-B, VQ-B - this means Bermuda registration. Russia is responsible for pilot training, but after we have checked the pilot and hired him, we must request Bermuda validation, and Bermuda approves the hiring of a Russian pilot by a Russian company.”

The main reason why airlines register aircraft in Bermuda is the tax savings, and significant ones at that. But it is tied to the safety of passengers, industry experts remind. First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Industry Vladimir Gutenev in an interview with the Tsargrad TV channel, he stated that responsibility for the airworthiness of the airliners lies not with the Russian government, but with the government of Bermuda.

But carriers, like the domestic Cabinet of Ministers, are hardly worried about this. No one is going to reduce taxes. At least, local manufacturers can’t count on this. “When we say, this is our aviation industry, we support it, so let’s at least make equal conditions,” Mr. Gutenev is indignant. “Our manufacturer, when releasing an aircraft into the sky, pays VAT, but a company that registers an aircraft in Bermuda and takes it on an operating or financial lease does not pay VAT.”

Rosstat was caught again in fraud with citizens' incomes

And these are not all nods to foreign aircraft manufacturers. The Russian government is eliminating import duties for foreign aircraft from year to year. That is why domestic carriers are diligently equipped with American and French winged aircraft. Against this background, endless statements about support for the Russian aviation industry look like a mockery.

No matter how high-quality the MS-21 is, if airlines don’t buy it, the business will fail. And the verbal interventions of officials, who, by the way, themselves prefer to fly on ultra-reliable ILs, will remain another fiction based on the text of public statements. The tragedy that occurred near the island of Java, which claimed the lives of almost 200 people, is another reason to think about the safety of air travel, primarily in Russia. After all, our country ranks alarmingly second in the world in terms of the number of plane crashes.

The 737 MAX 8 struggled for control from the first minutes of flight until it crashed into the sea. This is evidenced by data from flight recorders, the Indonesian National Transport Safety Committee said on Wednesday. reports .

At the same time, experts cannot understand why the pilots did not undertake procedures similar to those done by other crew during the flight the day before. Decoding the data showed that during the fatal flight the crew

more than twenty times prevented the nose-down of the aircraft, which was caused by the automatic system installed on this new type of aircraft.

This system automatically lowers the nose of the plane if it thinks it is raised too high and thus prevents a stall - a sharp drop in lift due to a stall. According to experts, this system received incorrect data from sensors and tried to prevent a dangerous configuration that actually did not exist.

The first time the pilots tried to prevent this system from lowering its nose two minutes after takeoff, and then again and again until the plane crashed into the sea. We are talking about the MCAS system (maneuvering characteristics augmentation system), about which many pilots in the world now have a lot of questions.

It is known that this system is present only on Boeing 737-8 and -9 aircraft; it was not installed on previous versions. Only after the disaster, the American manufacturer Boeing issued a bulletin for airlines informing about the principles of operation of the system, in the current version of the manual flight operation Only the decoding of the MCAS abbreviation was given, there was no other information.

“Everything is consistent with the hypothesis that there was a problem with the MCAS system,” said MIT aeronautics professor John Hansman.

According to aviation expert David Soucie, the situation in which the plane found itself thanks to the said system made intervention by the pilots “impossible.”

“The fact that they fought the MCAS system many times means that the rescue scenario was implausible,” he said. As it turned out, during the last flight, another crew simply turned off this system and took manual control of the plane.

In its statement yesterday, Boeing noted that the company would not comment on the crash while the investigation is ongoing, and clarified that “the appropriate crew response to a spontaneous leveling, regardless of the cause, is contained in existing procedures.”

Now experts will focus on the operation of the angle of attack sensors, the faulty operation of which could lead to disaster. However, it is already known that one of these sensors was replaced on the penultimate flight from Bali to Jakarta after it was discovered to be faulty.

At a press conference on Wednesday, experts said that the plane was not ready for the flight during the previous flight, as well as on the day of the tragedy, and had to return to Bali. The investigation has yet to find a voice recorder that could shed light on the actions of the crew.

The Boeing 737 MAX 8 passenger plane of the Indonesian airline Lion Air crashed over the sea off west coast Java Island shortly after flying from Jakarta to Pankal Pinang on October 29.

The accident killed all 189 people on board (181 passengers and eight crew members), including Indonesian employees, employees of the National Audit Council, members of the regional people's representative office of the Banka Belitung province and one foreigner - professional cyclist from Italy Andrea Manfredi.

According to Indonesian air navigation service spokesman Yohanes Sirait, the ship took off at 6:20 local time (2:20 Moscow time) and disappeared from radar 13 minutes later. Before the plane lost contact, the crew requested permission to return to the airbase. The FlightRadar24 website indicates that the first problems on board the Boeing 737 were recorded two minutes after takeoff, when it rose to a height of 610 meters. The last time before the fall, the aircraft's altitude was 1113 m, the speed was 345 knots, at that moment the airliner was 15 km from the Indonesian coast.

This is the first crash of a MAX 8 series aircraft and the largest in terms of fatalities among the Boeing 737.

The plane that crashed was completely new; it made its first flight only on July 30 of this year. His flight time was only 800 hours.

The MAX 8 is the best-selling aircraft in Boeing history. The number of orders for such aircraft has already exceeded 4,500 units worldwide. According to the manufacturer, among buyers of the new generation MAX aircraft are: largest airlines world, including Russian ones.

The first fragments of the fuselage were discovered by sailors sailing near the crash site less than an hour after the disaster. By the next day, divers had found 10 bodies. On October 31, one of the “black boxes” was raised to the surface. The hull of the airliner and one of its engines were also discovered.

The search operation led to another tragedy.

One of the most experienced rescuers, 48-year-old Siachruoa Anto, died during the dive due to sudden decompression.

In 2014, he took part in the search for the remains of the aircraft Air company Asia, and a week before his death he was saving people after an earthquake on the island of Sulawesi.

Boeing 737 MAX 8 flying from Addis Ababa to the capital of Kenya, Nairobi. There were 149 passengers and eight crew members on board, all of whom died. The causes of the disaster are still unknown. However, in the fall of 2018, the same Boeing of the Indonesian low-cost airline Lion Air 13 minutes after taking off from Jakarta airport and soon crashed into the sea 15 kilometers from the coast. According to the results of the investigation, there were problems in the new computerized control system installed on Boeing 737 aircraft.

Maneuvering Performance Enhancement System

Boeing has sent technical specialists to Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau and the US National Transportation Safety Board are also investigating the cause of the tragedy, since the plane is American. This council has already examined the reasons for the crash of an Indonesian Boeing of the same model that. Then 189 people died.

The flight pattern of the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 was similar to the behavior of the Indonesian airliner before the crash. The plane frequently changed altitude and speed, FlightRadar24 wrote.

The maneuvering performance enhancement system lowered the aircraft's nose even when it was not losing thrust. The pilots tried to correct the situation, but the automation prevented this from happening more than 20 times.

This system appeared on Boeing as a result of rearrangement of wing elements, Joe Ostrover, editor-in-chief of The Air Current, wrote about this. It was first used in the 737 MAX line.

The Boeing 737 has been in production for 40 years and has become the company's most popular aircraft. With the new MAX series, the company has found a way to achieve significant fuel savings of 14%. To do this, the designers moved forward new engines, and the system for increasing maneuvering characteristics was supposed to compensate for the additional lift that occurs in some flight modes; in fact, the nose of the aircraft began to lift up, and the tail stabilizers lowered it down automatically - this is how the expert explained the operation of the system.

"Any bug in the software can only make the situation worse"

Viktor Zabolotsky, President of the Federation of Aviation Enthusiasts, Honored Test Pilot of the USSR, on the air of “Evening with Irina Romaliyskaya”, told what could be the cause of the accident of the Ethiopian Airlines plane and whether the software should be trusted.

All this needs to be clarified and revealed during flight tests. And generally speaking, flight tests simply confirm the conclusions made by experts: engineers, designers and others. They simply confirm that it is safe. But if you really run into this, then there really is a whole problem here, which means you need to solve it, you need to get out of the situation, decide how to get out of this situation.

There were such cases. I know that my comrades were on the Tu-154 when the stabilizer was removed, and they had to act very energetically, and the company even had to hide this situation a little. Because if the Tu-154 had been stopped, then half the country would have stopped transportation.

- How do you assess the reaction now? Boeing company?

As usual, any company tries to get out of the situation with the least losses. Can you imagine what great amount aircraft, firstly, were released. Secondly, in addition to what has been produced, there are huge requests for these aircraft. Well, now we need to get out of the situation, how? It is necessary to give some recommendations if this is a design flaw.

After all, now all airplanes operate practically with electric remote control: a pilot sits and controls, although the steering wheel on a Boeing, but still he is like a joystick, he controls indirectly, through a computer. A person is practically included in this automatic control loop; he is the main link that controls this aircraft. And the computer that is installed on the machine keeps this entire flight within certain certain limits, it does not allow reaching high angles of attack, it does not seem to allow a large decrease or a large overload. He simply won't let it happen.

But at the same time, if an error has crept somewhere in the control algorithm, then everything will be the other way around, because in this case any error in software can only make this situation worse.

- And you assume that there is a software error here?

You see, this is an assumption. There are two points: airlines that suspend these flights, and at the same time, the losses for Boeing will be not only financial, but also very large in image.

How the plane crash in Ethiopia could affect Boeing

Boeing shares fell 10% on March 11, the worst decline since the September 11 terrorist attacks. Amid news from Ethiopia, contracts for the production of five thousand aircraft of the new 737 MAX 8 series are under threat.

The 737 MAX 8 is the company's fastest-selling aircraft. Introduced in August 2011, it promised fuel economy of 14% and quickly attracted buyers, collecting more than five thousand pre-orders. Only less than a thousand of them are so-called “firm orders,” that is, those that cannot be canceled.

"Boeing failed to provide a safe and reliable solution in a timely manner. The longer this drags on, the greater the chance that Boeing will lose orders," Neil Hansford, head of the Australian consulting company Strategic Aviation Solutions, commented on the situation to Bloomberg.

Malaysia has already announced a review of orders for new Boeings - the country was going to purchase 25 aircraft at a price of $120 million apiece. Even the loss of one in 90 customers could hit Boeing's business hard. What's worse, it can cause a domino effect and further failures.

All this plays into the hands of the company's competitors. Initially, the 737 MAX 8 was conceived as a response to the A320 neo of the European Airbus - it took off much earlier than Boeing, in September 2014. The A320 neo was losing to its American counterpart in terms of the number of orders, but now, after two accidents of its main rival, it has every chance of taking the place of the new Boeings.

In addition, in the eternal confrontation between Boeing and Airbus, a third player has appeared - the Chinese Comac C919. It was first introduced in 2015, and the aircraft made its first flight in May 2017. Only three of these aircraft exist so far, but manufacturers say they have received orders for more than five hundred examples. The main advantage of the Chinese model is the price: Comac C919 costs about $50 million.