Six minutes to disaster: How Ethiopian Air's pilots battled Boeing 737 Max

A preliminary report shows the crew's actions to counter malfunction

The alarms started sounding just seconds after Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 took off on March 10 from Addis Ababa with 157 people on board.

As speed and altitude readings started going haywire, a device known as a stick shaker activated on the left side of the cockpit, where the captain sits. The mechanism makes a loud noise and rattles a pilot’s control column to warn of an impending aerodynamic stall.

But the Boeing Co. 737 Max wasn’t about to stall. Instead, a computer was getting erroneous readings from a sensor mounted like a weather vane on the jet’s nose. The malfunction triggered