Analyse black boxes before grounding 737 MAX 8
The rush to ground all MAX 8s should wait until the Ethiopian Airlines black boxes have been analysed
If you have ever doubted the power of social media hysteria — amped by an uninformed press — to batter your share price, look no further than Boeing. The day after the Ethiopian Airlines crash, $28.1bn was wiped off the aircraft-maker’s market value. Within minutes of the crash, aviation forums were alive with speculation and rumour, much of it desperately trying to link the tragedy with the crash of a Lion Air Boeing 737 into the sea off Jakarta in October. A faulty sensor feeding data to one of the aircraft’s flight management systems — the manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system, designed to prevent the aircraft from stalling in flight — seems to have been the major factor in the Lion Air crash. Right now, the only similarities between the two accidents is that both aircraft were the same type — a Boeing 737 MAX 8 — and that both were flying somewhat erratically until they crashed. That the "black boxes" — the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder — from Sun...
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