Wasted Warnings: A Whistleblower Tells the Truth About the Fatal Crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302

By Bernd Kai von Hoesslin

On March 10, 2019, eight of my colleagues and 149 passengers were killed instantly when their Nairobi-bound flight from Addis Ababa crashed six minutes after takeoff. Such a loss was staggering, incomprehensible. Relatives and loved were overcome with grief. The nation of Ethiopia came to a standstill, stunned with sadness and disbelief. The wor

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bernd Kai von Hoesslin
• Release date: Mar 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781777142308

Bernd Kai von Hoesslin

Bernd Kai von Hoesslin, known to many as "Kai" , is a retired Boeing B737 instructor and captain with over 2,500 hours instructing in aircraft or simulators and 6,000 in-command hours on the B737 variants. He has flown or is type-rated on the B777, B747, A300, A310, and BAe 146 and has served with twenty-one airlines or aircraft operators in his thirty-seven-year career. After leaving his fourth year of Industrial Engineering he entered aviation, training at such academies as Flight Safety International and Lufthansa Aviation Training. He has travelled and lived across the globe from South America to China exercising his passion for training pilots and flying passenger jets.

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Chapter 1

ET302 Is Missing

It was the worst news a pilot can ever hear.

"Shortly after takeoff…"

"Communication from the cockpit terminated at…"

"All passengers and crew presumed…"

I was in my room at the Marina Hotel in Cotonou, Benin. I had arrived the day before operating a B737-700 (a non-MAX aircraft) on a roughly six-hour single-sector flight from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa and was on a forty-eight-hour layover before making the return flight. I had been up late the night before catching up with friends back home via email and with aviation news, but nonetheless was up early for my usual early dawn swim that Sunday morning, March 10, 2019. I had been a professional commercial airline pilot for thirty-six years at this point, but adjusting to time zone changes was still difficult, which is a reason why I made a habit of always rising early and getting some exercise. Plus, March is very hot in Africa and often very humid, and mornings tend to be cool and breezy and quiet, especially at the pool before the Sunday family-day rush and boisterous wedding receptions. 

That morning it was a refreshing swim in the hotel pool that overlooks the wide, sandy beach and the palm trees of the Gulf of Guinea. It felt great doing laps and falling into a gliding rhythm, just me and my thoughts and a lovely breeze. It really helped clear the cobwebs from my head and invigorate the spirit. 

Unlike many expat pilots I tended to be a loner by choice. I made it a point to be friendly with everyone I worked with and encountered, but I was not particularly fond of fraternizing with my colleagues as it always turned into a conversation that was company related. I was definitely not arrogant or aloof; I prided myself on the fact that my crew could talk to me and that they trusted me, and I would protect them to the best of my ability. I just wanted it to be known that I was here to do a job and that was it. We were professionals, okay? We didn’t need to be friends. It was important that my colleagues — especially members of my crew — respect me. I was always fair, but I could be tough too, when it was warranted and necessary. As for socializing, I avoided gossip and small talk as much as possible, and didn’t hang out at the hotel bar, for instance, or pal around town, or meet colleagues for dinner at nightspots. If I had some free time, I would wander around town by myself; usually I ate alone too. Of course, all that free time meant I tended to become something of a world news, aviation, and social media junkie. 

After my swim I had breakfast, then headed back to my room. The lobby was less deserted now, and I wasn’t really paying attention to any of the TV screens around the hotel that broadcast news headlines. Besides, internet service in Cotonou was generally so-so, and everything was in French. 

At around 6:30 am, however, I noticed an off-blocks message on my device about ET (Ethiopian Airlines) Flight 302 that had come to me from a trusted acquaintance in dispatch at ET. It was an unusual alert, and I had no idea why it had been sent to me, but right away I realized something was wrong. Aircrafts communicate to flight operators via what is known as the on-board Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS). An off-blocks message, for example, indicates that the aircraft has moved away from the parking position and is in the process of taxiing for taking off. In short, wheels are rolling. Usually ACARS continue to transmit without too much delay, but the message I had received claimed the ACARS aboard 302 had ceased transmitting. A few days later, speaking with a dispatcher on duty that day, I saw the two ACARS messages on his computer screen, which were received in TELEX type form. The airborne message, which was sent showing the time that 302 lifted off of the runway that morning, came well after the impact had happened. Only the Addis tower controller had actually seen Flight 302 take off and fly eastbound with his own eyes (he commented, they climbed very fast); in other words, the ET dispatchers had no way to confirm if Flight 302 actually was airborne, what had happened post-takeoff, or where it might be headed. The next brief radio contact the pilots would make was with the approach controller, who was located deep within the control tower and only had his radar screen tracking the flight, right after liftoff.

According to protocols set up by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) for dealing with aviation emergencies, authorities are advised to address three distinct phases based on increasing levels of presumed severity. The first is the uncertainty phase (INCERFA), in which there is a lack of knowledge about the basic safety of the crew and their passengers; the second phase reflects apprehension concerning the safety of crew and passengers, and is known as the alert phase (ALERFA); the third — and most serious — phase reflects certain knowledge that the lives of those on board an aircraft are in imminent danger and require immediate assistance. My assumption, shortly after I received the message from dispatch, was that Flight 302 was in this distress phase (DETRESFA). 

In a DETRESFA alert essentially every available civil and government (including military) aviation resource, air search-and-rescue service, and medical facility is alerted and put on notice for immediate assistance and mobilization. If fact, had this been any other major airline in most other countries — let’s say American Airlines or Lufthansa or Air Canada — I have not a doubt that Flight 302 would have been located within ten minutes, especially so close to home base of that first loss-of-contact message; ET302 would be lost for two hours. For one thing, the area where the aircraft disappeared was restricted to military aircraft, and that meant 302 was on a no flight route that was off-radar and not being tracked. Second, it being an early Sunday morning in peacetime with no scheduled military maneuvers or flights planned (the protracted civil war between Eritrea and Ethiopia that had crippled the economies of both countries and caused the loss of thousands of lives formally had ended in 2018), chances are no one on duty would be looking for a civilian aircraft in restricted airspace. Third, the airport radar system at Addis had been working in a degraded mode for many weeks now, so its coverage and accuracy were greatly reduced. 

What does degraded mode mean?

A brief digression is necessary. On March 8, 2014, a Malaysian flight bound for Beijing, MH370, took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport with 239 passengers and 12 crew on board. About forty minutes after takeoff, Kuala Lumpur lost radar contact with MH370. Military radar was able to track the aircraft’s unexplained flight path alteration for about another hour until it too lost contact. Six years and more than $150 million later, the combined resources of international and private investigators have not resolved the mysterious disappearance of the downed aircraft somewhere in the Indian Ocean. 

About all investigators were able to determine was that Flight 370’s automated data system and transponder had been shut off, meaning the flight at that point was entirely off the grid. 

The world responded to the unexplained and complete disappearance of a commercial aircraft with hundreds of passengers aboard with shock and frank disbelief: How the hell, in the modern era of ultra-sophisticated and mind-blowingly powerful tracking technology, could a commercial airplane just vanish? As one source concluded, with some degree of understatement, Flight 370’s disappearance brought to public attention the limits of aircraft tracking and flight recorders.

Aircraft at the time were tracked using ground-based radar and what is known as ADS-B receivers (automatic dependent surveillance — broadcast). The problem is, one, the broadcast does not occur in real time, and two, radar doesn’t have the capacity to track aircraft over oceans or remote areas.

In the aftermath of MH370, the world’s critical attention brought remedies. Demands for real-time tracking on all commercial aircraft gained momentum. By September 2015 the European Union issued requirements for new flight tracking installations on aircraft beginning in 2018, and in 2019 new real-time GPS flight-tracking technology was unveiled that maximized coverage area to 100 per cent of the globe. 

The world breathed a sigh of relief. The loss of 239 people was tragic, but perhaps some small amount of good came of it. Air travel safety had taken a quantum leap forward. Nothing like this would ever happen again. 

All of ET’s aircrafts were outfitted with ADS-B, which, as we know, transmits location, speed, flight number, and other information at 1090 MHz. This data is picked up by ground stations and eventually displayed on air traffic control screens. Aircrafts also receive this data from each other as part of the Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). The ADS-B system in a plane needs to get position data before it can transmit. These days, that data comes from a global satellite navigation system: ET302 did have these two antennas connected to this system and the ability to send this data. Airport surveillance radar (ASR) system detects and displays the presence and position of aircraft in terminal areas, the airspace around airports, and has two components: primary and secondary radar. The primary radar detects the position and range of aircraft by microwaves reflected back to the antenna from the aircraft’s surface. The secondary surveillance radar consists of a second rotating antenna, often mounted on the primary antenna that interrogates the aircraft’s transponder, which then transmits a radio signal back containing the aircraft’s identification, barometric altitude, and an emergency status code if entered by the pilot, which is displayed on the radar screen next to the return from the primary radar. 

For weeks prior to the crash of ET302, however, the two-component system had been downgraded, meaning that only the primary radar was operational. At Addis, the approach controller, who was in contact with ET302, typically controls traffic below an elevation of twenty-five thousand feet within a radius of sixty miles (ninety-six kilometres) of the airport. What this means is, had the secondary radar been operational, it would have been able to pinpoint the exact location of Flight 302’s final position transmission in real time. In other words, had there been survivors, the injured could have been located within minutes, rather than the hours it ended up requiring. The two-component system downgraded to a one-component system created operational safety issues, and it is uncommon in the industry for a system to remain for weeks on end in this condition. During my discussion with the air traffic controllers in the days after the crash, I was advised the downgrade was due to a lack of funding for repairs. This is unacceptable in aviation safety.

I remember looking at one of my regular flight tracking websites and noticed a flight incoming to Addis Ababa from Bangkok, ET629. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I followed its path and noticed that it made an unusual and early descent moving southeast of Addis airport flying at around fourteen thousand feet, which was highly unusual (it’s the lowest altitude possible for a commercial aircraft to avoid terrain in that sector). The ET Bangkok flight had been instructed to scan the general area where