The plane is airborne, bound for Nairobi, Kenya.Ĩ:38:44 a.m.: Just as the plane’s main gear lifts from the runway pavement something goes wrong with a sensor on the left-hand side of the nose. Seconds later, the main gear leaves the ground and the sun-drenched landscape falls away. Though just 29, he has amassed more than 8,000 hours flight experience in nine years with the airline, including more than 1,000 in the 737. The captain pulls back on the control yoke and the plane’s nose lifts into the air.
As the plane reaches rotation speed, passengers in the left-hand side window seats can see the Entoto Mountains rising above the airport terminal. At an elevation of 7,656 feet, the airport is more than 2,000 feet higher than Denver International, and it takes longer for the plane to get airborne. Its 160,000-pound mass steadily gains speed under the massive engines’ thrust.
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It’s a beautiful day to go flying.Ĩ:38:00 a.m.: Its CFM International Leap-1B jet engines throttling up to full takeoff power, the 737 Max eases forward. The plane - all white, with the word “Ethiopian” emblazoned across the front of the fuselage in four-foot-high letters and the red, yellow, green of Ethiopia’s national colors splashed on its tail in the shape of feathers - rolls forward and makes a 90 degree turn to line up with the runway centerline. The control tower gives the flight permission to take off. At just four months old, the plane still has that fresh-out-of-the-box feel, with olive-green seats in the back and red ones up front. The Nigerian writer Pius Adesanmi is on board, as is Ralph Nader’s grand-niece, Samy Stumo, and seven members of the United Nations World Food Program. Those aboard include 148 adult passengers and two children from 35 countries, including eight Americans. With seats for 160 passengers, the plane is nearly full.
The weather is fair, sunny and 61 degrees, with a light wind out of the northeast. Together, they allow us to understand with much greater precision what happened during the doomed flight and why the plane’s design flaws were so dangerous.Ĩ:37:34 a.m.: A 737 Max aircraft, Ethiopian registry ET-AVJ, is waiting near the threshold to runway 07R at Addis Ababa Bole International Airport. Then last week Ethiopia’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau released a 33-page preliminary report into the incident, including partial transcripts of the cockpit voice recorder and readouts of the flight data recorder. In the aftermath, the 737 Max was grounded around the world, and as investigators labored to understand what had happened, observers were left to speculate on the basis of limited information. But because it was a nearly new Boeing 737 Max jet, and because another 737 Max had crashed under similar circumstances less than five months before, its destruction raised the shocking possibility that the latest model from the world’s most venerable jet manufacturer might be fundamentally unsafe. On its own, the crash was a tragedy, an avoidable accident that took the lives of 157 men, women, and children. Few airplane crashes have had repercussions on the scale of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which plunged into the ground six minutes after takeoff on March 10, 2019.
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