Pilots for two U.S. airlines flying Boeing's 737 MAX weren't trained about a key change to an automatic system that's been linked to the fatal crash of a Lion Air jet last month, according to pilot representatives at both airlines.
Jon Weaks, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said Monday the airline and the pilots “were kept in the dark.”
“We do not like the fact that a new system was put on the aircraft and wasn’t disclosed to anyone or put in the manuals,” he said in an interview. What’s more, he noted, Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration have now warned “that the system may not be performing as it should.”In order to protect against a possible stall on the MAX, Boeing made a change to a flight-control system so that it automatically pushes the nose of the aircraft down when a bladelike sensor that sticks out of the fuselage indicates that the nose is pitched up and putting the plane in danger of a stall.
In the Lion Air crash that killed 189 people in Indonesia, investigators have determined that this sensor, the Angle of Attack (AOA) sensor, was feeding bad data to the jet’s flight computer,