On Friday, the Ethiopian Minister of Transport announced that Ethiopian investigators confirmed in their final report that a malfunction in the flight program was the cause of the crash of the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max in 2019.
On March 10, 2019, six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Flight ET302 bound for Nairobi crashed southeast of the Ethiopian capital, killing 157 passengers and crew.
The crash occurred less than five months after, in similar circumstances, a 737 MAX belonging to Indonesia’s Lion Air crashed, killing 189 people.
The two tragedies that plunged the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing into the worst crisis in its history showed a failure of the flight control program, the MCAS anti-stall system.
In a preliminary report, in March 2020, Ethiopian investigators had already indicated that the “design” of the MCAS system “makes it vulnerable to unwanted activations.”
“In line with the initial report,” Minister Dagmawit Moges said today, the final document confirmed that the sensor located to the left of the aircraft “failed immediately after takeoff, sending false data to the flight control system.”
He continued, “False data triggered the MCAS system, which repeatedly pointed to the nose of the aircraft until the pilot lost control” of the aircraft.
He added that the final report is scheduled to be issued in the coming days.
After this second air disaster in less than five months, delivery and production of the 737 Max were suspended and all existing aircraft were grounded for 20 months, before they were gradually allowed to fly again from the end of 2020, following corrections introduced by Boeing.
Airlines, including Ethiopian Airlines, returned last February more than 200 of these aircraft that were in their service.
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