Boeing crisis: Pilot who hitched a lift ‘saved Lion Air Max day before disaster’

An off-duty pilot hitching a ride aboard a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 airliner helped disable a flight-control system and stop it crashing.

The Ethiopian Airlines disaster that left 157 people dead on March 10 was the second fatal crash of the same new plane type within five months. The crash of Lion Air Flight 610 shortly after take-off from Jakarta last October killed 189 people on board.

But now it has emerged that an off-duty pilot travelling on the plane involved in the Lion Air disaster just the day before it plunged into the Java Sea helped avert a crash, according to Bloomberg.

The so-called ‘dead-head pilot’ on the earlier flight from Bali to Jakarta instructed the crew to cut power to the motor driving the nose down.

Just the next day, under command of a different crew in what officials said was an identical situation, the plane crashed, killing all on board.

The automated flight software called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) has come under scrutiny after similarities between the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air disasters.

Both aircraft crashed shortly after take-off.

The MCAS technology installed on Boeing 737 Max 8 jets automatically forces the aircraft’s nose down to stop it stalling.

The role of the extra pilot on the Lion Air flight was omitted from Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee’s report last November and hasn’t previously been reported.

It highlights how some pilots faced with the malfunction have been able to stop disaster while others lost control of their planes.

Indonesian investigators found the plane had failures on previous flights and hadn’t been adequately fixed.

The Lion Air crash inquiry suspects last October’s tragedy may have been caused by an angle of attack (AOA) sensor on the outside of the plane which transmitted incorrect data that could have triggered MCAS that forced the plane's nose down.

In November, after the Lion Air crash, Boeing issued an "Operations Manual Bulletin" advising airline operators how to address erroneous cockpit readings.

It pointed airlines "to existing flight crew procedures to address circumstances where there is erroneous input from an AOA sensor," a Boeing statement said.

All Boeing 737 Max-8 and 9 planes will be grounded until May, the US Federal Aviation Administration said.

Air crash investigators are studying the Ethiopian Airlines plane’s flight ‘black box’ flight data recorders recovered from the crash site.