Engineer placed on board fatal Lion Air flight as ‘anticipatory measure’

IT HAS been revealed that Lion Air dispatched one of its engineers on the fatal flight that crashed Monday killing all 189 aboard.

According to Aviation Herald, “the airline confirmed one of their maintenance engineers was on board the aircraft during the accident flight. This was an “anticipatory measure” in the event of technical problems with the new aircraft. As such, “the presence of the technician has nothing to do with the condition of the aircraft before taking off.”

While the airline waters down the condition of the aircraft before take-off the coincidence is too great for several airline safety analysts who say the two are “definitely linked.”

Separately, however, the videos and pictures that are circulating the Internet claiming to show the accident flight from a passenger’s perspective are false and relates to another Lion Air flight JT-353 from Jakarta to Padang which encountered turbulence some time ago.

And the Indonesian transport ministry says it has found faults in two other Boeing 737-MAX 8 jets, including a cockpit indicator display problem which may be similar to one reported in the crashed flight.

It is inspecting 10 of the new MAX aircraft owned by Lion and Garuda.

However, Boeing has delivered over 200 of the MAX aircraft and the problems found are very minor in nature.

The crash of a near-new Lion Air Boeing 737 on Monday, killing 189 people, has focused attention on the safety of the world’s best selling commercial passenger jet, with some commentators even suggesting the jets be grounded.

New details call into question the state of the nearly-new Lion Air aircraft that crashed into the sea, killing all 189 people on board.
Thomson Reuters (Markets) Australia Pty Ltd

The reality is the 737 is the world’s most reliable aircraft and — with its arch-rival the Airbus A320 — the backbone of the world’s airline fleet.

This year Boeing rolled out the 10,000th and the Seattle-based aerospace giant is producing 52 aircraft a month as it works to delivery a backlog of more than 4600.

Each day the global fleet of 7500 737s perform 28,000 flights and since it entered service in 1967, more than 22 billion people have flown on the aircraft.