Finally! Boeing CEO admits failure to properly implement 737 MAX safety alert feature

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Dennis Muilenburg, the President, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Boeing Company, said his company failed to properly implement a safety alert feature on its 737 MAX aircraft, grounded globally in wake of two deadly plane crashes.

โ€œWe clearly fell shortโ€ฆ The implementation of that software, we did not do it correctly,โ€ Muilenburg said.

โ€œOur engineers discovered that,โ€ he said, adding that the company was working to resolve the issue.

The safety feature can notify pilots of problems early in a flight, and possibly could have prevented the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 in March, Chris Brady, the author of Boeingโ€™s 737 Technical Guide, told the BBC.

โ€œI’m fairly confident that the Ethiopian Airlines flight probably would not have crashed if they had had the AOA disagree alert,โ€ Brady said, referring to the safety software.

The crash, which killed all 157 passengers, is now being investigated, but the prime suspect is the malfunction of the aircraftโ€™s flight control system. A doomed Lion Air flight out of Indonesia, also a 737 MAX, is said to have experienced a similar problem last October before it crashed, killing the 189 people onboard.

Boeing said last month that the alert, which could have prompted pilots to follow a different emergency procedure, โ€œhas not been considered a safety feature on airplanes and is not necessary for the safe operation of the airplane.โ€

The US Federal Aviation Administration concluded in an internal investigation earlier this month that the agency failed to properly oversee Boeingโ€™s safety tests for the 737 MAX, deferring to the companyโ€™s own experts and allowing the defective systems through the agencyโ€™s approval process.

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Chief Assignment editor is Oleg Siziakov

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