B5
THE ASTORIAN • SATuRdAy, OcTObER 26, 2019
Tatan Syuflana/AP Photo
National Transportation Safety Committee investigator Nurcahyo Utomo holds a model of an airplane during a press conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday.
Lion Air crash report points to Boeing, pilots, maintenance
By NINIEK KARMINI
and MARGIE MASON
Associated Press
JAKARTA, Indonesia — An Indonesian
investigation found that a combination of
design flaws by Boeing and inadequate pilot
training and maintenance lapses by Lion Air
doomed a Boeing 737 Max jet that plunged
into the Java Sea a year ago, killing 189
people.
The final accident report released Fri-
day said Lion Air flight 610, from Indone-
sia’s capital Jakarta to the nearby town of
Pangkal Pinang off Sumatra island, crashed
partly because the pilots were never told
how to quickly respond to malfunctions of
the Boeing jet’s automated flight-control
system.
Investigators, however, indicated there
was plenty of blame to go around. They said
that nine critical problems were responsible
for the tragedy.
“If one of the nine hadn’t occurred, maybe
the accident wouldn’t have happened,” chief
investigator Nurcahyo Utomo said at a news
conference.
Budget carrier Lion Air’s jet vanished
from radar after air traffic control was told
the plane had altitude and air speed troubles.
It plunged into the sea just 13 minutes after
takeoff on Oct. 29, 2018.
Five months later, a similar malfunction
caused a Max jet to crash in Ethiopia, killing
all 157 people on board.
That led to the grounding of all 737 Max
jets and put Boeing under intense pressure
to explain problems associated with the
flight-control system, known as MCAS. The
aircraft still has not resumed flying. Boe-
ing officials say the company is nearly fin-
ished with changes to flight software and
computers.
The troubles with the Max jets have also
raised questions about the safety certifica-
tion process in the U.S.
Indonesia’s National Transportation
Safety Committee said the MCAS on the
Lion Air flight relied on a single “angle of
attack” sensor that gave erroneous infor-
mation, triggering an automatic nose-down
pitch of the plane.
“The investigation considered that the
design and certification of this feature was
inadequate,” according to a statement issued
by the head of the committee, Soerjanto
Tjahjono. “The aircraft flight manual and
flight crew training did not include informa-
tion about MCAS.”
The report released Friday outlined var-
ious missteps. The aircraft, only in use for
two months, began having problems a few
days before it crashed. A new angle of attack
sensor was installed while the aircraft was
on the Indonesian island of Bali a day before
the crash, but it had been mis-calibrated
during an earlier repair, leaving it 21 degrees
out of alignment. The problem was missed
when it was installed, and the investigators
said they were unable to find out if the new
sensor was properly tested.
Shortly after takeoff on a flight later
that day from Bali to Jakarta, the airspeed
and altitude warnings went off, activating
the captain’s stick shaker and signaling an
impending stall. The captain and co-pilot
regained control of the aircraft by manually
overriding the automated system with help
from a third Lion Air pilot who was hitching
a ride in the cockpit jump seat.
Instead of turning around, the plane con-
tinued to Jakarta and landed safely and the
pilot did not report fully about the problems,
including the activation of the stick shaker,
the summary said. This oversight kept main-
tenance crews from investigating, and the
critical information was not shared with the
pilots of the flight that crashed.
Investigators said the Indian captain and
the Indonesian co-pilot were unaware of the
entire situation because a warning function
that should have told the pilots the two angle
of attack sensors were out of sync was not
installed on the aircraft.
“Let’s just say, that flight from Bali to
Jakarta was very lucky,” said Indonesian
aviation expert Gerry Soejatman, who says
most of the blame for the crash should be
placed on Boeing.
“How Boeing could allow the MCAS to
rely on a single source of data and act upon
that single source without cross checking
the other angle of attack indicator is any-
one’s guess,” he said in an interview.
The latest news left victims’ relatives
even more upset.
“We are very angry (at Boeing) because
their negligence has caused our loved ones
to die,” said Muhammad Asdori, 55, whose
brother and nephew were killed in the Lion
Air crash.
“They should have anticipated any kind
of problems with adequate training for
pilots who fly their planes. We were even
more angry when we learned that they had
only admitted their mistake when the second
Max 8 plane crashed in Ethiopia.”
The Indonesian report followed another
last month from U.S. federal accident inves-
tigators who concluded that Boeing and the
Federal Aviation Administration underes-
timated how a blizzard of visual and audi-
tory warnings would slow pilots’ ability to
respond quickly enough to avert crashes.
Utomo, the Indonesian investigator, said
coordination inside the cockpit was a prob-
lem during what was only meant to be an
hour-long flight.
“We found that during the accident flight
both pilots were busy and preoccupied by
their own tasks,” he said. “One pilot was
doing the job of flying while the other pilot
was completing procedures, so the commu-
nication between them did not run well.”
This week, Boeing CEO Kevin McAllis-
ter was fired and replaced by Stan Deal, the
chief executive for the company’s services
devision.
Boeing issued a statement Friday saying
it was working to address all the safety rec-
ommendations to prevent similar flight con-
trol problems from recurring.
It said the 737 Max and its software were
subject to “an unprecedented level of global
regulatory oversight, testing and analysis,”
including hundreds of simulator sessions
and test flights, regulatory analysis of thou-
sands of documents, reviews by regulators
and independent experts and extensive certi-
fication requirements.
Boeing said it has redesigned the flight
control system to activate only with input
from both angle of attack sensors. The
MCAS also will be subject to a “maximum
limit” that can be overridden by the pilot’s
controls.
“These software changes will prevent the
flight control conditions that occurred in this
accident from ever happening again,” it said.
Boeing said it’s also updating crew man-
uals and pilot training.
“Safety is an enduring value for everyone
at Boeing,” it said.
The FAA said in a statement that it wel-
comed the recommendations from the
investigation.
“The FAA continues to review Boeing’s
proposed changes to the 737 Max. As we
have previously promised, the aircraft will
return to service only after the FAA deter-
mines it is safe,” it said.
Boeing recently reported its third-quarter
earnings dropped by half, partly because of
$900 million extra in costs for the Max.
Air travel in Indonesia, the world’s fourth
most populous country with nearly 270 mil-
lion people, has surged and budget carriers
such as Lion Air have sprung up to accom-
modate demand. But the industry has strug-
gled to keep pace and faces a shortage of
pilots, antiquated infrastructure and poor
regulatory oversight. The country has been
plagued by a string of deadly accidents in
recent years.
Facebook launches news section, will pay publishers
By BARBARA ORTUTAY
and TALI ARBEL
Associated Press
Over the course of its 15 year history,
Facebook has variously ignored news orga-
nizations while eating their advertising rev-
enue, courted them for video projects it sub-
sequently abandoned and then largely cut
their stories out of its newsfeeds.
Now it plans to pay them for news head-
lines — reportedly millions of dollars in
some cases.
Enter the “News Tab,” a new section in
the Facebook mobile app that will display
headlines — and nothing else — from the
Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post,
BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, NBC,
USA Today and the Los Angeles Times,
among others. Local stories from several
of the largest U.S. cities will also make the
grade; headlines from smaller towns are on
their way, Facebook says.
Tapping on those headlines will take you
directly to publisher websites or apps, if you
have any installed, which is one thing pub-
lishers have been requesting from Face-
book’s news efforts for years.
It’s potentially a big step for a platform
that has long struggled with both stamp-
ing out misinformation and making nice
with struggling purveyors of news. Though
media watchers remain skeptical that Face-
book is really committed to helping sustain
the news industry.
‘IT’S A GOOd dIREcTION THAT THEy’RE
WILLING FOR THE FIRST TIME TO VALuE ANd
PAy FOR NEWS cONTENT. THE TROubLE IS THAT
MOST PubLISHERS AREN’T INcLudEd.’
David Chavern | head of the News Media Alliance, a publisher trade group
Facebook declined to say who is getting
paid and how much, saying only that it will
be paying “a range of publishers for access
to all of their content.” Just last year, CEO
Mark Zuckerberg said he wasn’t sure it
“makes sense” to pay news outlets for their
material.
But now, as Zuckerberg told The Associ-
ated Press in an interview, “there’s an oppor-
tunity to set up new long term, stable finan-
cial relationships with publishers.”
The Associated Press is not participating
in the initiative.
News executives have long been unhappy
about the extent to which digital giants like
Facebook make use of their stories — mostly
by displaying headlines and short summa-
ries when users post news links. A bipartisan
bill introduced in Congress this year would
grant an antitrust exemption to news compa-
nies, letting them band together to negotiate
payments from the big tech platforms.
“It’s a good direction that they’re will-
ing for the first time to value and pay for
news content,” said David Chavern, head of
the News Media Alliance, a publisher trade
group. “The trouble is that most publishers
aren’t included.”
Zuckerberg said Facebook aims to set
up partnerships with a “wide range” of
publishers.
“We think that this is an opportunity to
build something quite meaningful here,” he
said. “We’re going to have journalists curat-
ing this, we are really focused on prove-
nance and branding and where the stories
come from.”
In a statement, the Los Angeles Times
said it expects the Facebook effort will help
expand its readership and digital subscribers.
Facebook killed its most recent effort to
curate news, the ill-fated Trending topics,
in 2018. Conservatives complained about
political bias, leading Facebook to fire its
human editors and automate the section
until it began recycling false stories, after
which the social giant shut it down entirely.
But what happens when the sprawl-
ing social network plays news editor? An
approach that sends people news based
on what they’ve liked before could over
time elevate stories with greater “emo-
tional resonance” over news that “allows
public discourse to take place,” said
Edward Wasserman, dean of the gradu-
ate journalism program at the University of
California-Berkeley.
“It deepens my concern that they’ll be
applying Facebook logic to news judg-
ment,” he added.
The social network has come under criti-
cism for its news judgment recently. In Sep-
tember, it removed a fact-check from Science
Feedback that called out an anti-abortion
activist’s video for claiming that abortion is
never medically necessary. Republican sen-
ators had complained about the fact-check.
Facebook says a small team of “sea-
soned” journalists it employs will choose
the headlines for the “Today’s Story” sec-
tion of the tab, designed to “catch you up”
on the day’s news. The rest of the news sec-
tion will be populated with stories algorith-
mically based on users’ interests.
That sounds similar to the approach taken
by Apple News, a free iPhone app. But
Apple’s effort to contract with news orga-
nizations has been slow to take off. Apple
News Plus, a $10-a-month paid version,
remains primarily a hub for magazines;
other news publishers have largely sat it out.
Apple’s service reportedly offered pub-
lishers only half the revenue it pulled in
from subscriptions, divided according to
how popular publishers were with readers.