A remarkable stretch of global air safety is over, after a second major airplane crash in just five months. And they both happened to the same model, for the same reason.
A Boeing 737-Max plane went down in Ethiopia; it was the same model, and the same type of crash, as the Lion Air crash in Indonesia back in October. The planes have been grounded and Boeing is scrambling to fix its newest model.
Welcome back, another exciting episode of Plain English. I’m Jeff, the producer of the show is JR. So many people ask me what the producer does. You have no idea. All I do is write the episodes and record them. Big deal! JR does the rest. He edits the audio, he works with our translators, he produces the web page, and best of all, he makes sure that the files get out to all of you on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts or your smart speaker, wherever you listen. That’s all JR. And you know, we have never missed an episode. Once we were late, but that was my fault. We released an episode in the afternoon instead of the morning. But JR makes it all happen behind the scenes.
If you’d like to take a look at JR’s handiwork, just go to PlainEnglish.com/139. That’s where you’ll find the full transcript of today’s episode, with the instant translations. And—this is not to take anything away from JR—but we have a team of great translators, too. Paola in Brazil, Meg in Canada, Tao in China, and Mattia in Italy all work to get you translations of the hardest words and phrases every single week. You can see their hard work at PlainEnglish.com/139 for this episode. Just click on the language you’re interested in, and then point at a word in red. You’ll see the translation pop up instantly. It’s pretty cool. PlainEnglish.com/139.
Have you had the chance to listen to an audiobook yet? I heard from Edgar in Peru and he said he has already listened to two audiobooks from Audible—and they were in English. And—I think he might have said this just to be nice—he said that listening to Plain English helped him understand the audiobooks. He said he gets about 80 percent of the content in an audiobook. I think that’s great because you always want to be challenging yourself; you always want to be a little outside your comfort zone. So if trying an audiobook is something you would like to do, then you can try one out with Audible. Just go to PlainEnglish.com/book and you’ll be able to sign up for a free trial. Your free trial will get you one book to keep forever. You can get one in English or in your own language; they have all the Harry Potter books if that’s of interest, too. That’s one of the two books Edgar listened to, the first Harry Potter book. PlainEnglish.com/book to get your free audiobook and trial subscription.
Second Boeing crash raises questions about 737-Max
A Boeing 737-Max 8 jet, operated by Ethiopian Air, crashed just six minutes after takeoff last week, killing 157 people and raising questions about the airplane model’s safety. That’s because the same model crashed in October. That flight, operated by Indonesian carrier Lion Air, crashed in the Java Sea just 12 minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 passengers and crew.
Evidence gathered from the crash site in Ethiopia points to the cause: the plane’s stabilizers, which are intended to keep the plane from tilting too far up or down while it’s flying. The evidence suggested that the stabilizers actually pushed the nose of the jet down in the early minutes of the flight, when the plane should have been climbing upward. Data from flight tracking services showed the plane’s altitude and speed were fluctuating. That led investigators to believe the pilots were fighting an automated system built into the plane. Investigators suspect that in both cases, faulty sensors or a software glitch caused the plane to force the nose downward, when what the plane needed was to climb upward. If this happened, the plane’s pilots would be trying to lift the angle of the plane, while the plane’s automated system was pushing the nose downward. This stabilization system is new on Boeing’s 737-Max jet.
Governments around the world, including that of the United States, grounded all Boeing 737-Max jets in response to the crash. America’s Federal Aviation Administration, which often leads the world in aviation safety, grounded the jets several days after other countries, including Britain, took similar action. The deciding factor for the FAA was the fact that the Ethiopian crash and the Lion Air crash were too similar. They think the new stabilization feature was responsible in both cases.
The model is just a couple of years old; the first unit went into service in May 2017, but Boeing has built only 376 of them. Airlines have placed orders for thousands more, though those are now on hold. Boeing is racing to create a software update for the plane, which they expect will be complete in April. The 737 is the best-selling aircraft model in the history of aviation. Boeing’s first 737 model flew in 1967, and the Max is Boeing’s fourth generation of 737s. It is a single-aisle plane, usually with three seats on each side of the aisle. The planes fly short- to medium routes; about a third of the jets in the sky at any given moment are Boeing 737s.
This new version has its engines farther back than previous versions, pushing weight backward on the plane. With this design, the weight of the engines toward the back of the plane might point the nose of the plane too high as the plane climbs into the sky. If the nose is pointed too high, the plane would stall, or lose its lift and risk falling to the ground. For that reason, Boeing installed a new system of sensors to compensate for this risk. In other words, if the plane senses that the nose is pointing too high, it will push the nose down, so that the plane maintains a safe angle.
This is the part that investigators think is faulty. They think the system thought the nose was pointing too high, when in fact it was not. For that reason, the system pushed the nose down, causing pilots to fight the automated system and try to push the nose up again. This is why the altitude and speed of the flight fluctuated: investigators think the pilots were struggling against the plane’s own system.
With every new model, airplanes get more and more sophisticated; they get more and more automated. That means, more and more tasks are done automatically by onboard computers and not manually by pilots. In general, that is a good thing: it tends to reduce the number of human errors onboard a flight. But when something goes wrong, all those pilots don’t necessarily have the deep experience maneuvering a plane that they need to respond to an emergency. They get too used to having the plane do everything that when the pilots need to intervene, they don’t have the deep experience they need.
The second concern is that the pilots have to know a lot about the automated systems. Systems are going to fail; that is just a fact of life and a fact of technology. An experienced and well-trained pilot can recognize when a system fails, turn it off, and then maneuver the plane manually. But as planes get more and more complex, it gets harder and harder to know everything about all of those systems. As one expert said, automation is a double-edged sword.
The Ethiopian Air plane went down just 40 miles from the airport in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Abbaba. The plane was just four months old.
If that part about automation in airplanes worries you, just wait until we have self-driving cars. The idea of the first generation is that if the system fails, or you’re about to have an accident, a passenger can take control of the car. That’s probably fine for me and you; we know how to drive and how to avoid accidents. But imagine fifteen, twenty years in the future, someone who has never had to drive himself, needing to grab control of the car and avoid an accident in seconds. He wouldn’t have the whole lifetime of experience driving under normal conditions to guide him.
I hope I’m not giving you nightmares with all this. I fly every week for work. I think I’m going to just block this from my mind, but I have a feeling I’m going to be calculating the angle of the nose of the plane on every flight for a while.
Eduardo from Chile is an aviation fan. I asked him what he thought about the recent troubles with the 737 and he told me that overall automation is a good thing, but we’re losing the broad skills of all the older pilots. Sounds like that’s exactly right. I first got to connect with Eduardo on WhatsApp, and I just love using that to stay in touch with all of you. If you would like to send me a note on WhatsApp, just send a message to +1 312 967 8757 .
Almost time for today’s expression. You know, I’m starting to understand the enormous power I hold in my hands with these expressions. When I talk about an expression like this, people all over the world start using it! It’s pretty cool. JR even told me he used the word “sour grapes” with one of his coworkers the other day. And he used it perfectly; they knew exactly what it meant.
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