This archive report was first published on 25 October 2019.
On October 29, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 took off from Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, with a harried first officer and a captain who had the flu. The plane crashed into the Java Sea just 13 minutes later, killing all 189 people on board.
According to the Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee's final report, released on October 25, 2019, the pilots were handed a plane with a fatal design problem. The report blamed a combination of factors, including systematic design flaws in the Boeing 737 Max, maintenance issues, and lapses on the part of the flight crew.
Investigator Nurcahyo Utomo listed nine contributing factors, including an automated system's reliance on a single sensor, the miscalibration of that sensor during repairs, and a lack of flight and maintenance documentation.
'The nine factors have to happen together,' Mr. Nurcahyo said at a news conference in Jakarta. 'If one of those nine contributing factors did not happen, the crash would not have happened.'
Less than five months after the Lion Air crash, another 737 Max went down in Ethiopia, killing 157 people. Malfunctions of the automated system, called MCAS, sent both planes into nose dives from which they did not recover.
Boeing's profits fell by roughly half in the third quarter, and the company's president and chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, said in a written statement that the company was addressing the Indonesian regulators' recommendations and taking actions to enhance the safety of the 737 Max.
