Recorders recovered from jet crash

All 157 people aboard the Ethiopian airliner were killed.

Investigators have not determined the cause of Sunday’s crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed all 157 people aboard, but the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder have both been recovered, the airline said.

The two recorders will need to be taken to a specialized center to read their data, said Lynnette Dray, an aviation expert and senior research associate at University College London.

“If the boxes are intact, then they will be able to take the data off them and look at it immediately,” Dray said.

But if they are dented or burned, the data might not be easily extractable.

“They might need to decontaminate them, or adjust smoke components first,” she said.

Dray said the two recorders would be treated slightly differently. Some of the flight data, which generally includes information about speed, air pressure and other details, might already be known to investigators. But the cockpit voice recorder, which captures anything that might have been said or heard by the captain and co-pilot, can be more revealing — and more sensitive, Dray said.

China and Indonesia ordered their airlines Monday to ground all of the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft that they operate.

The Indonesian Transport Ministry on Monday called for the temporary grounding of the planes operated by Indonesian carriers, following the fatal accidents involving two new aircraft of that model.

The first accident came in October, when a Lion Air flight crashed in Indonesia, minutes after an erratic takeoff. On Sunday, the Ethiopian Airlines flight went down shortly after leaving Bole Airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with an unstable trajectory.

After Lion Air Flight 610 nose- dived into the sea shortly after taking off from the airport in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, killing all 189 people on board, the Transport Ministry grounded all Max 8s operating in the country. But after inspections were conducted last November, the planes were declared safe to fly.

Indonesian and U.S. aviation authorities have raised the possibility that Flight 610’s crash was because of pilots fighting an automated anti-stall software in the Max model that may have been erroneously activated by incorrect flight data.

China’s main airlines are among the biggest users so far of the new Boeing jets, having taken delivery of most of the planes they have ordered.

Ethiopian Airlines officials said Monday they would ground all Boeing 737 Max planes in their country. And Cayman Airways said it was temporarily grounding its two Boeing 737 Max 8 planes.

Several airlines indicated on Monday that they would not ground their Boeing 737 Max jets, or, in some cases, had no plans to cancel orders.

JEMAL COUNTESS / GETTY IMAGES Recovery personnel use an earthmover to take debris from a crater where Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed in a wheat field just outside the town of Bishoftu on Sunday.