Investigators: Boeing didn't anticipate how pilots would handle multiple alerts on 737 Max

Sept. 26 (UPI) -- Boeing anticipated that pilots of its 737 Max aircraft would react to multiple simultaneous alerts on the planes differently than they did, a National Transportation Safety Board report released Thursday said.

The report came within a year of two crashes involving the aircraft -- a Lion Air crash Oct. 29 that killed 189 people and an Ethiopian Airlines crash March 10 that killed 157. Investigators linked the two crashes to the 737 Max's automated Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.

"We saw in these two accidents that the crews did not react in the ways Boeing and the [Federal Aviation Administration] assumed they would," said NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt.

"Those assumptions were used in the design of the airplane and we have found a gap between the assumptions used to certify the MAX and the real-world experiences of these crews, where pilots were faced with multiple alarms and alerts at the same time."

The NTSB made seven safety recommendations related to the MCAS in its report with the intent of considering the effect multiple alerts may have on pilot response, how pilots react to airplane failures and how to more clearly present failure indications to pilots.

The report comes one day after Boeing announced the creation of a safety committee to monitor its aircraft designs. The aerospace company said it's working on a software fix for the aircraft's MCAS problem, which grounded the plane worldwide in the spring. The FAA must approve the software fix before the planes can go back into service.