An official for Boeing, the company whose planes have been involved in two fatal crashes in recent months, has said it will “do everything” to prevent accidents in the future.
The world’s largest aerospace company is in the midst of a global crisis over the safety of its 737 Max 8 jetliners, which have been grounded by a number of countries.
Flight data from the crashes of Ethiopian Flight 302 on 10 March and a Lion Air plane in October show “clear similarities”, and suspicions have emerged that faulty sensors and software may have contributed to the crashes.
Speaking to reporters in Washington on Wednesday, Boeing vice president of product strategy, Mike Sinnett, said: “We are going to do everything to make sure that accidents like this don’t happen again.”
A tweet from AFP reporting the remark prompted bemusement from some Twitter users.
The announcement comes as Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg wrote an open letter to Ethiopian Airlines saying the company was “humbled and learning” from the two disasters which claimed a total of 346 lives.
Speaking of the “unimaginable pain” of the victims, he said: “We’ve stood shoulder to shoulder in partnership with the Ethiopian team to grieve and extend our deepest sympathies to the families, friends and communities of the passengers and crew.”
On Wednesday, Sinnett also announced it had reprogrammed software on its 737 MAX to prevent erroneous data from triggering an anti-stall system that is facing mounting scrutiny in the wake of two deadly nose-down crashes.
The planemaker said the anti-stall system, which is believed to have repeatedly forced the nose lower in at least one of the accidents, in Indonesia last October, would only do so once per event after sensing a problem, giving pilots more control.
It will also be disabled if two airflow sensors that measure key flight data offer widely different readings, Boeing said, confirming details reported by Reuters on Tuesday.
“We are going to do everything that we can do to ensure that accidents like these never happen again,” Sinnett said.