One of the most gruesome airplane accidents involved the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 to Nairobi from Addis Ababa, on the 10th of March 2019. Ranked one of the deadliest plane crashes in recent times, the Boeing 737 MAX 8 killed all the 157 people on board, leaving families horrified and Boeing facing queries over the safety of the specific aircraft model(Wise, 2019).
Capel and Kyama (2019) report that the aircraft left Bole International Airport for Jomo Kenyatta International Airport at 05:38 UTC with a total of 157 people on board. Barely a minute after takeoff, the captain radioed the control tower, citing an unspecified issue with flight control. A minute after the call, the plane’s maneuvering characteristics augmentation system (MCAS) activated, sending the aircraft into a nosedive. According to Capel and Kyama (2019), even after the pilots managed to prevent the nosedive, the plane did not stop losing altitude when the MCAS re-activated, plummeting it far down. The pilots resolved to disable the electrical trim tab system, effectively killing the MCAS. This act was a grave mistake since disabling trim tab system prevented the pilots from trimming the stabilizer into a proper position. With the engines running at full speed, pressure on the stabilizer would not let the pilots put it into proper position. Three minutes later, the pilots requested to return to the airport. After the permission was granted, the pilots switched the electrical system back on to stabilize the plane but inadvertently activated the MCAS, pushing the plane’s nose even further down to a point they could not raise it. The plane ceased to appear on the radar screens and crashed about six minutes into the flight, killing the entire crew (Igunza, 2019).