Indonesian investigators have determined that design and oversight lapses played a central role in the fatal crash of a Boeing 737 MAX jet in October, according to people familiar with the matter, in what is expected to be the first formal government finding of fault.
The draft conclusions, these people said, also identify a string of pilot errors and maintenance mistakes as causal factors in the fatal plunge of the Boeing Co. plane into the Java Sea, echoing a preliminary report from Indonesia last year.
Misfires of an automated flight-control feature called MCAS on the MAX fleet led to the nosedive of the Lion Air jet and a similar crash of an Ethiopian Airlines MAX shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa in March. The two crashes took 346 lives, prompted the grounding of all 737 MAX planes and disrupted the global aviation industry.
Excerpt from WSJ