Lion Air crash report points to Boeing, pilots, maintenance

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — An Indonesian investigation has found a Lion Air flight that crashed and killed 189 people a year ago was doomed by a combination of aircraft design flaws, inadequate training and maintenance problems.

A report released Friday said Lion Air flight 610, from Indonesia’s capital Jakarta to the island of Sumatra, crashed partly because the pilots weren’t told how to quickly respond to malfunctions of the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet’s automated flight-control system. The jet plunged into the Java Sea minutes after its takeoff on Oct. 29, 2018.

Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee said the automated system, known as MCAS, relied on a single “angle of attack” sensor that provided erroneous information, automatically shoving the nose of the Max jet down. The report identified various missteps prior to the crash.