In this episode, we talk about the Boeing 737 Max accidents and the reason behind it.

Boeing’s 737 is one of the most widely used aircraft. But two crashes of its new 737 Max 8 model and the following investigation, led to some dark details about how a software system overpowered the pilots and plunged everyone on board to a horrific end.

Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System, abbreviated as MCAS is a software designed to save an aeroplane from a potential stall due to a high angle of attack. The angle of attack is the angle between the aircraft direction of mention forward and the wing. Aircraft usually have a slight positive angle of attack to create more lift at slower speeds. But if the angle of attack becomes too high, added drag is created and there is a danger of a stall where aircraft falls out of the sky uncontrollably.

MCAS was designed to lower the airplane’s nose when the angle of attack becomes too high and thus preventing a stall. But in two of Boeing’s 737 Max 8 aircraft, these systems erroneously pushed the planes into nosedive resulting in catastrophic accidents. The worst part of this disaster was that the pilots of 737 were not informed of this particular software and wasn’t even mentioned in any training documents.

In this episode, we delve a little deeper into the background of these tragedies and learn how competition between two aircraft manufacturers resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives.

Previous episode mentioned in the episode: 048: Jet Engines

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