)No mayday call. That’s not a good sign. Plane was at 10.000 ft when something abrupt happened and pilots weren’t able to make a call. Either they were incapable physically or the radio had no power. Transmitter was working. Had to be a catastrophic event. No pilot error
The plane in the Sriwijaya crash does not have the software that was at the center of the Max crashes. Boeing added software to the plane’s flight computer that would work in the background so the Max would feel to pilots like previous versions of the 737. It was called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, and it proved to have serious flaws. In both the crashes, pilots wrestled to keep their aircraft aloft as MCAS repeatedly pushed the nose down. They were unable to disengage the system, which eventually sent them into dives from which they could not recover.
First Max flight: Boeing 737 max returns to US skies with American Airlines flight
The plane was 26 years old. Isn’t that ancient?
Anthony Brickhouse, an aviation accident investigator and associate professor of aerospace safety at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, said the first thing he wondered when he heard about the missing jet was whether it was a 737 Max.
With that factor out of the equation, he said investigators will focus on three broad areas as they try to figure out what happened to Sriwijaya Flight 182: the human element, the plane and the environment on the day of the flight, most notably weather.
