Quite possibly so. I’m just saying that witness recollections of sudden unexpected events can be notoriously unreliable, and these accounts are neither indicative of root cause nor do they seem to correspond with the statement of the Ethiopian Airlines CEO who was presumably privy to the ATC conversations. There may have been structural failure following unknown causative events.
LOL! 
A single engine failure wouldn’t cause a crash though, right? What are the chances of runway FOD causing a double engine failure?
SAS Flight 751 was an engine failure caused by a software feature that the pilots didn’t know about.
Though if you are saying it doesn’t sound like something caused by MCAS, you have a point.
Yup, money talks.
Such bravery!
Southwest Airlines just began service to Hawaii, and while they have not used this plane yet, plans are to use it almost exclusively in the near future. They seem to have ordered a bunch of them. This may not be good for Southwest. But local Hawaiian Airlines may be happy this is happening to the new competition.
So far, only one small Canadian airline flies the plane to here.
Not really.
Given that there are about 400 of them in service (another 4600 on order), and they typically make 1-3 takeoffs per day, my very rough estimate is that there have been around 50,000 Boeing 737 takeoffs between these 2 incidents. I’d want a bit more info first.
I’m guessing one crash per 50K flights is a much higher incidence rate than for other types of planes. OTOH, it’s still far too low to draw any statistical conclusions.
Aircraft types can be grounded after a single incident, if a glaring flaw is revealed that clearly threatens safety. The cause of the Lion Air crash is pretty well understood at this point, but the cause of the Ethiopian crash is not - and the eyewitness reports of smoke and noises in the minutes prior to impact of the latter suggest that its cause isn’t the same as for the Lion Air crash. IOW, not a clear pattern that justifies grounding all planes of the same type (unless the pattern that comes out of all this is that the entire airplane, from nose to tail, is a giant piece of shit made of cardboard and bailing twine).
I would imagine that depends on the type and quantity of FOD on the runway.
Vacation charter airline Sunwing grounds its MAX 8 fleet for “evolving operational reasons”. Translation: “we want to keep flying them, but they’re banned at all our usual destinations”. This event has apparently taken us to new frontiers of literary creativity.
That is standard in the aircraft industry, and Airbus does it as well. And it has been done for quite a while. I am more inclined to look for a design problem, possibly in software.
Canada has formally ordered all MAX 8s grounded.
Looks like MAX 8 has just been grounded in the US too, per comments from POTUS.
Only twitter reports so far
CNN says the same thing (reporting President’s comments):
Some might doubt this statement.
The grounding in the US came several hours after the Canadian announcement.
If I had not been following these developments I would not be aware of the level of incompetence that exists among our political leaders. As recently as yesterday the Minister for Transport Canada, Marc Garneau, was going on about how awesomely safe the 737 MAX was, and how there was no need to call for a grounding. Today’s announcement was touted as being based on “new information” that he had received from his panel of experts. What new information, you ask? The exact same information that was widely known three freaking days ago! When he made the announcement Garneau cited the exact same reasoning, practically word for word!
One also wonders how come Boeing is suddenly overcome by an “abundance of caution” based on information that was available right from the start.
Most fatal airline crashes are a series of problems that act on each other to make things worse. A loss of engine due to FOD that causes an additional failure on top of a software issue.
Boeing is a major player in the aviation business so the US government should be all over this in terms getting to the bottom of it. This is another de Haviland Comet in every sense of the word.
We’ve already grounded the plane in the US so it’s universally grounded. Now is the time to throw every effort into figuring it out.
FAA Official: Canada just grounded your planes, making the U.S. the only country left where they can fly. Are you going to put your planes on the ground or do we have to order you to?
Boeing Official: Ummm, can you give us two hours to get back to you with an answer?
I was just thinking about this possibility. It could be that the eyewitness accounts are accurate and something else started the problem, and possibly that sensor got knocked out due to fire/whatever it was, which turned an otherwise resolvable problem (e.g. land immediately) into an unsolvable problem (due to sensor/software issue).
Ethiopia has refused to send the black boxes to the US despite requests from American officials and instead have requested that France analyze them, to which France has agreed. This after their first choice, Germany, declined due to lack of proper software. No reason explicitly stated, but not hard to imagine that the Ethiopians don’t trust an American analysis to be objective since Boeing is taking so much heat.
Commercial pilots can correct me but auto pilot systems allow for a variety of climb options. They could be programmed for angle of climb, rate of climb etc… While this is engaged the crew should be monitoring the flight as if they were physically controlling the plane. That means watching the heading, rate of climb, air speed and other instruments to ensure they are within their flight envelope and proper course.
It would be easy to get distracted or flat out not pay attention to what’s going on because the plane is doing all of the flying. It would also be easy to over-focus on an emergency with the expectations that the plane will do it’s thing while you sort out the problem. Throw a quirky bit of software into the mix and now you’re fighting to control a mechanical issue made worse by software that’s determined to do something you don’t want it to do.
once you’ve crossed a threshold of control it usually takes some altitude to correct it. This flight didn’t have the altitude available to fix things.