| HN Mirror

The first was Lion Air. I know of several multinationals in Asia that ban employee travel on Lion Air and its subsidiaries. They've recently been caught attempting to bribe transport safety officials, with the knowledge of senior management at Lion; a number of their pilots and other crew have been caught using crystal meth; and they were formerly banned from EU airspace (the ban was lifted a few years ago).

Indicative of their company culture is that on the MAX accident flight, there was a maintenance engineer in the jump seat observing in an attempt to diagnose the AoA issue which had also occurred on the previous flight of the same aircraft. On the previous flight, the specific combination of factors to cause the trim runaway didn't occur. This aircraft should have been grounded while the issue was resolved, and instead was taken for a test flight with unwitting passengers on board.

The second was Ethiopian, who are growing rapidly and thus hiring rapidly. The first officer of the accident flight had flown an aircraft (any aircraft) for a total of 350 hours.

FAA wrote to Ethiopian in 2016 decertifying them, with 60 findings identifying a systemic failure of the entire quality management and training management systems. They were recertified in 2017 but there have been whistleblower reports that nothing significant changed, with politically-oriented decisions, nepotism, unsafe practices, task cards being signed off without executing the required maintenance actions, etc. EASA still doesn't consider the issues resolved. Look up Yonas Yohannes Yeshanew, who used to be Director of Aircraft Engineering there.