The unfortunate accident of Ethiopian Airline Boeing 737 Max last Sunday resulted in the grounding of this type of aircraft. Now, even in the US, despite the US Federal Aviation Administration originally standing by the aircraft strongly insisting that there was insufficient evidence to link Sunday's crash tragedy with another accident involving Boeing Max 8 in Indonesia five months ago, it decided to ground their planes too after all!

These two planes were brand new but still went down shortly after take-off. Despite the onslaught against this most successful model in Boeing's history in various countries around the globe, Donald Trump, as usual, was the first to undermine efforts to present a united US front by questioning the safety of new aircrafts. He wrote on Twitter: 'Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly!'

A preliminary report on Indonesia's Lion Air plane, which plunged into the sea after take-off, found that a stall prevention feature had erroneously kicked in. With nothing significant about the cause of Sunday's crash in Ethiopia, the aviation world is still divided on whether these models are really safe to fly.

Have pilots become complacent and their expertise eroded by relying too much on automatic systems? According to an expert, "Automation has been extremely beneficial and will continue to be so but it should be in conjunction with the pilots. Algorithms cannot work out every eventuality."

Jos Edmond Zarb

Birkirkara