From USA Today:

"The “black box” data recorder from a crashed Lion Air jet shows its airspeed indicator malfunctioned on its last four flights, investigators said Monday, just hours after distraught relatives of victims confronted the airline’s co-founder at a meeting organized by officials.

National Transportation Safety Committee chairman Soerjanto Tjahjono said the problem was similar on each of the four flights, including the fatal flight on Oct. 29 in which the plane plunged into the Java Sea minutes after taking off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board."

The last four flights were:

Denpasar-Manado 27 Oct
Manado-Denpasar 28 Oct
Denpasar-Jakarta 28 Oct
Jakarta-Pangkal Pinang 29 Oct

Lion Air jet's airspeed indicator malfunctioned on 4 flights

For such a new aircraft (that, I guess, must be under some kind of warranty) is there actually an exchange of maintenance information happening between the airline and Boeing in a (real-)timely manner?
Or does Boeing usually not get to know what problems have occurred and (hopefully) been fixed by the airline's staff, even if it's a recently delivered airplane?

And what if they had diligently followed the appropriate manufacturer advice and maintenance procedure[s] after each event? And had been unable to reproduce the fault?

I would suggest the firing of the company maintenance manager may be your biggest clue here at present.

"The plane shouldn't have been flying at all." Where is the mel listing for the max btw?

Re: Interesting examples of other similar events, and re: further comments on those but not on the main subject.

Please head with RE:

A Squared's comment above, "Ahhh, OK, obviously I though you were speaking of the current LionAir accident." hits a nerve and prompts me to post this reminder. Often during the course of this thread I see that when comments are made about a separate accident, bringing in little details such as V1, V2 called or not, it confuses the picture for everyone if no immediate indication is given first regarding which scenario they are describing.

In order to avoid non-signposted sidetracks and subsequent confusion.
Not a rule per se, but more manners or common sense?

hear hear. Warping into a different universe mid-puzzle tests even the greatest minds.

Bloomberg reporting Boeing on the verge of issuing a safety alert on the 737 Max series:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...itter-business

Which rather sounds like what those poor sods on JT610 were up against.

The second to last sentence in that article is the best bit... "It wasn’t immediately clear if the airspeed issue had any connection with the angle-of-attack matter."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-...d=hp_lead_pos3

Goes on

STS?
 

RE: I worked in a Middle Eastern airline which had only 2 score aircraft but started a Defect Control Dept in late 1970's; each departure station would SITA telex the defects to base and these would be reviewed by a senior engineer and advice to Maintenance, they were also loaded into a very basic ATA program which would show on a measles chart repeat entries for investigation (the most frequent being ATA38, bogs basins). Each morning the Boeing and Pratt & Whitney rep would take note of the problems 1st hand from the hand written cardex system; when we joined up with an American Operator, we had a live link through dedicated SITA line to their Maintenance system; when ETOPS arrived this department was further tuned. With LION Air having over 100 Boeing's one would hope they have a monitoring Dept; it is likely that whilst the days of most resident Reps have gone by way of the bean counters exit route, there is now both ACARS and internet and surely manufacturers have similar access to relevant data from such a major airlines but then can only act bi laterally not instantaneously.

https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-s...ion-air-crash/

Wow...

That is staggering.
With the weather as observed, daylight and a known history it was difficult to imagine any pilot losing control to the degree that has been surmised.
That a transport category aircraft can enter an 'aggressive dive' that that upon release of the electric trim may commence again ought be a little more than a 'service bulletin'. Given the article references 'only during manual flight', can this trim hard over happen on approach, as a poor soul hand flies an ILS?

(my underlining)

Does that mean pulling a breaker?
Upon which trim will return to neutral? Or stay wherever it happened to be?

SLF question: so "fly the damn airplane", oft-repeated above, would in this case be the worst possible advice (and was most likely what the luckless crew were trying to do)?

Yes that was the point.
Following the checklist with the cacophony of noise alerts and aural tones, the luckless souls were supposed to ignore all the noise, and NOT fly manually.
If what is contained in the article is correct, this is beyond a service bulletin and requires an immediate cessation of operations and grounding until the root source of the fault is identified, isolated and rectified.
Give the often repeated mantra of 'commercial viability' the regulatory authorities would appear (again if this article is correct) to be quite happy to throw the luckless pilots flying this junk under the oncoming bus.
It reeks of regulatory capture, with the usual caveat of waiting for the service bulletin to be promulgated.

It certainly doesn't encourage me to get on a 737 MAX for the time being.

The QF A330 that took the plunge, twice, didn't result in grounding the fleet, despite the authorities NEVER working out what happened. Airbus came up with a procedure where crews push-button-disabled a particular system.

If you're comfortable handflying and the aeroplane starts doing something in pitch you don't like with, say, full back stick, you trim against it. Or you grab the trim wheel and stop it. Or you engage the AP! My point is, you have to be happy with hand-flying to be able to have spare brain space to try something.

So, is the STS the culprit when the speeds/AoA go haywire?

From the Seattle Times article

In reference to the faulty AoA data ...

Does that mean that it causes the airspeed indicators disagree with each other, or does that mean that the airspeed indicators disagree with the stall warning/stick shaker (but agree with each other) ?