A Boeing 737 Max flown by Ryanair dived at high speed in the final stages of a journey to Stansted airport, sparking an official investigation, i can reveal.
Data shows flight FR1269 descended more than 2,000ft in just 17 seconds on 4 December last year.
Air accident experts declared a “serious incident” after the aircraft dropped at a rate of more than 8,000ft per minute, despite flying at a low altitude at the time.
Nobody was hurt on the 197-seat plane, which was on a two-hour route to the UK capital from Klagenfurt in Austria.
Ryanair said the case involved an “unstable approach” prior to landing. The airline is co-operating with the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) while it examines precisely what happened and why.
The incident involved a Boeing 737 Max like this one (Photo: Nicolas Economou / NurPhoto via Getty)
Two of the Boeing airliners went into disastrous nosedives several years ago, killing 346 people, and the manufacturer may yet face prosecution in the US for alleged breaches of a legal settlement related to those crashes.
This was “during go-around“, according to the AAIB. This is when a plane approaches a runway but its pilot aborts the landing and begins climbing upwards again with engines at full power, before circling the airport and making another attempt to land.
The incident also involved a “level bust,” according to Ireland’s Air Accident Investigation Unit, which is assisting the AAIB. This is when an aircraft flies at least 300ft below or above the altitude at which air traffic control has instructed its crew to fly.
An AAIB spokesperson told i: “We can’t provide any further detail at the moment as the serious incident is still under investigation.
“We can share that the aircraft landed safely and there were no reported injuries to passengers or crew. The investigation is nearing completion and likely to be published sometime in the autumn.”
So far, there is no information available on what may have caused the incident – such as a design, engineering, manufacturing or maintenance problem with this specific aircraft or with 737 Max jets generally; a pilot error or another human factor; or an air traffic control issue.
But flight records show that this 737 Max, which typically flies five or six routes a day, did not take off again for two days after the incident.
One civil aviation expert told i this may suggest there could have been concerns about an issue with the Boeing airliner, which is less than five years old.
Stansted airport. The flight on 4 December had just aborted a landing when the Boeing 737 Max dived (Photo: David Goddard/Getty)
Analysis of the Ryanair flight, using onboard data collected by the website Flightradar24, indicates that the jet had made a steady descent to 2,350ft by 11:03am as it prepared to land at Stansted.
At this point, it appears to have aborted the landing and begun climbing for a go-around. This lasted about a minute.
But Flightradar24 shows that it then suddenly dropped from 4,425ft to 2,300ft in just 17 seconds. During this time, its speed also rapidly increased from 226mph to 321mph.
The airliner rose again, steadied its altitude and landed successfully about 10 minutes later.
Weather records show there was light rain at Stansted at the time, and the cloud conditions were overcast.
A Boeing 737 Max, like this one, had an ‘unstable approach’ while attempting to land, according to Ryanair (Photo: Urbanandsport/NurPhoto)
Ryanair said: “This was a case of an unstable approach. The crew performed a ‘go around’ and landed normally on the second approach in line with Ryanair procedure.
“Ryanair reported this matter to the AAIB in compliance with our operating manual and we have provided full details to, and are co-operating fully with, this routine AAIB investigation. We can make no further comment until such time as the AAIB have completed their review of this flight.”
An approach is the final period of a flight, lasting from about 10 miles away from the destination until landing is completed.
There are rules about an aircraft’s speed, altitude and rate of descent during an approach, which is deemed “unstable” if the aeroplane strays outside of these parameters.
Unstable approaches are “not uncommon,” an aviation expert told i, and sometimes result in a captain aborting a landing and trying again if it cannot be corrected. This is a “perfectly normal and safe thing to do,” he explained.
But it is “unusual” for an airline to refer an unstable approach to the AAIB, he said, which indicates Ryanair must have been “concerned” about the dive. It is also rare for the authority to open an investigation into one, which shows “they want to know what happened and why”.
Only five other airline incidents in the UK last year led to AAIB inquiries and none appear to have involved an unstable approach.
The expert added: “What Ryanair did in reporting this was absolutely the right thing.”
Boeing’s 737 Max problems
Concerns about the safety of some Boeing airliners have been in the spotlight this year after a door plug fell off a 737 Max at 16,000ft in January, believed to have been caused by loose bolts.
Nobody on the Alaska Airlines flight was killed. But US regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration have restricted Boeing from increasing production on its Max jets until they are “satisfied” that quality control has improved in its factories.
Passengers were lucky not to be sucked out of this Boeing 737 Max after its door fell off and was later found in Portland (Photos: Getty Images)
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is considering whether to issue criminal charges against Boeing next month after ruling that it violated a $2.5bn legal deal from 2021, which the aerospace manufacturer denies.
Investigations found that in both cases the airliners’ MCAS software – a flight-stabilising feature – had repeatedly pushed the noses down against the pilots’ wishes and made them hurtle into the ground.
It emerged that Boeing had not told pilots about its new MCAS software on the Max variant of the 737 to avoid costly retraining programmes.
Wreckage of the Boeing 737 Max that crashed in Ethiopia in 2019 (Photo: Michael TEWELDE / AFP via Getty Images)
Boeing’s CEO Dave Calhoun apologised to relatives of the victims at a US Senate committee hearing last week. “We are totally committed in their memory to work and focus on safety,” he assured them.
Mr Calhoun said the company recognises that it’s “responsible for the safety of millions of passengers and flight crews every day”, and asks each of its 170,000 employees “to consider themselves an aviation safety advocate”.
The DoJ has until 7 July to announce its decision.
Ed Pierson, a former Boeing manager who became a whistle-blower after raising concerns about safety standards at its 737 Max factory in Renton, Washington State, told i: “Any high-speed incident is very concerning. Any incident in a go-around is very concerning.”
Given that the Ryanair plane did not fly again for two days afterwards, Mr Pierson “would not be surprised” if it was subjected to inspections and possibly repairs during that time.
Mr Pierson, who established the Foundation for Aviation Safety last year, is campaigning for all 737 Max airliners to be grounded in phases so they can be thoroughly inspected for any manufacturing faults.
Boeing has highlighted that several independent safety experts have previously examined manufacturing problems alleged by Mr Pierson and concluded that they were all “routine maintenance issues and not real safety risks”, according to the Seattle Times.
But US regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration have restricted Boeing from increasing production on its Max jets until they are “satisfied” that quality control has improved in its factories.
American investigators are analysing why a Boeing 737 Max dived at a rate of 4,000ft per minute in April, coming within 400ft of crashing into the Pacific Ocean, after aborting a landing in Hawaii. But it appears this was because of pilot error in bad weather, rather than anything being wrong with the airliner.
Last weekend another 737 Max flying from South Korea to Taiwan rapidly descended nearly 25,000ft in five minutes, according to Flightradar24, after detecting a pressurisation fault. After an emergency landing, 13 people were taken to hospital with eardrum pain, Yonhap News Agency reported.
A 737 Max is also under investigation after suffering “substantial” damage during a “Dutch roll“, in which a plane simultaneously sways from side to side and rocks up and down. Boeing’s chief engineer has said that it involved an isolated problem with one aircraft rather than a wider design or engineering fault.
Ryanair’s renamed 737 Max airliners
Ryanair has 136 Boeing 737 Max airliners, making it the second biggest operator of the model in the world – but as a passenger, you might not realise when you’re flying on one.
A few months after the second crash, the airline replaced the “Max” name with “737 8200”, which is what passengers now see on their safety cards onboard. It is the only airline in the world to use this designation.
The Ryanair safety card for its Boeing 737 Max airliners, using the “8200” name in the top left corner (Photo: aircollection.club)
This led to speculation that Ryanair carried out the rebranding to disguise from passengers that they would be flying on a 737 Max – although Boeing had sometimes used the alternative name prior to the crashes. The Boeing whistle-blower Ed Pierson claims that Ryanair “don’t want people to know it’s a Max”.
Invited to comment by i, Ryanair did not respond. But when it ordered more of the airliners in 2020, its CEO Michael O’Leary said that he didn’t expect any loss of confidence in the 737 Max from passengers.
Steve Moss, a retired senior inspector of air accidents at the AAIB, told i that a steep decline “is not what you want if you’re at low level” under any circumstances.
He said that “lots of different things could have caused” the incident, including “crew mishandling” rather than a problem with their aircraft.
Read Next
Mr Moss recalled one example of an airliner’s pitch suddenly changing “simply because the co-pilot leaned against the control column while reaching forward to adjust the engines”.
But another aviation industry expert, who asked to remain anonymous, said that it was “unusual to have an aeroplane offline for two days” if an incident had been caused by a relatively simple pilot error.
“Level busts are almost always because of pilot inattention or distraction,” he explained. In this case, engineers “were probably investigating something technical which may have been behind it.”
He added: “Ryanair are a very safe airline and I have absolutely no safety concerns about their operation.”
Boeing, London Stansted Airport and the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority declined to comment while the investigation is ongoing.
Ireland’s air accidents team is collaborating with the UK’s AAIB experts, based at Farnborough airfield in Hampshire, because the Ryanair airliner is registered in Dublin. A spokesperson for the Irish Department of Transport said they are “precluded by law from making any comment on this investigation” before it is complete.
