Airlines warned of potential software flaw in Boeing 737

The  Federal Aviation Administration, the US Aviation regulator has notified all airlines to warning from Boeing that the latest version of its best-selling 737 Max jet, the US Aircraft maker’s top selling twin-engined  jet has a potential flaw in safety-critical software, following the Indonesia’s Lion Air jet crash on October 29, plunging into the Java sea, which killed 189 people.

The FAA said that they would order all 737 Max operators to follow Boeing’s advice to remind pilots how to deal with false information from a sensor which could confuse the crew when they are manually flying the aircraft and lead to it going into a steep dive and Mayday situation.

Data recovered from one of the aircraft’s black boxes showed the plane had encountered problems with its air speed on its previous four flights and furthermore the air crash investigators had found that the Lion Air Flight experienced “erroneous input”  from one of its “ angle of attack sensors”, an aerodynamic calculation of the angle of the wings relative to the airflow. The sensor feeds information to the instruments used by  pilots for flying  the aircraft manually and also delivers data to the flight computer. The flight JT610 crashed in to the sea 13 minutes after take-off in good weather, not long after the crew had radioed air traffic control to request a return to Jakarta. Radar records show the aircraft was having trouble maintaining altitude and air speed after take-off.

Boeing has to date delivered 219 Max jets since the model was introduced last year.