Ethiopian Airlines black boxes sent to Paris as US joins 737 ban
Grieving families of those killed in Sunday’s Ethiopian Airlines crash stormed out of a meeting with the company on Thursday, saying they were not being given any information.
“I’m so angry,” Yemeni citizen Abdulmajid Shariff, who lost his brother-in-law in Sunday’s crash, told Reuters.
“They called us to give us a report on bodies and the reasons for the crash but there was no information.”
Riyadh resident Sultan Al Mutairi, whose brother was one of the 157 people killed said: “We did not get any answers [at the meeting].”
An Ethiopian delegation flew the black boxes from the crash site to Paris for analysis.
The voice and data recorders from the Boeing 737 Max 8 were taken by Ethiopia’s Accident Investigation Bureau to France after Germany declined a request for assistance, saying it was not technically possible.
Late on Wednesday, the ban on the Boeing 737 Max aircraft became worldwide when US President Donald Trump joined Canada and other countries in grounding the aircraft amid mounting fears over the jets’ airworthiness.
The US authorities said new evidence showed similarities between Sunday’s crash and a fatal accident in Indonesia in October.
The Federal Aviation Administration said findings from the crash site near Addis Ababa and “newly refined satellite data” warranted “further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents”.
An FAA emergency order grounded 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft until further notice.
Mr Trump said the “safety of the American people and all peoples is our paramount concern”.
Mexico late on Wednesday suspended Max 8 and 9 operations, after Canada and Chile joined the long list of countries to ban the plane from flying in their airspace.
Many airlines voluntarily took it out of service. Brazil, Costa Rica and Panama followed suit.
“Hopefully they will come up with an answer but until they do the planes are grounded,” Mr Trump said.
FAA acting chief Daniel Elwell said the agency was “working tirelessly” to find the cause of the accident but faced delays because the flight data recorders had been damaged.
Boeing chief Dennis Muilenburg said he supported the US decision “out of an abundance of caution” but continued to have “full confidence” in the safety of the plane.
The accounts of the recent crashes were echoed in concerns registered by US pilots on how the Max 8 behaves.
At least four American pilots made reports after last October’s Lion Air crash, all complaining the aircraft suddenly pitched downward shortly after take-off, according to documents reviewed by AFP on the Aviation Safety Reporting System, a voluntary incident database maintained by Nasa.
In two anonymous reports on flights just after the Lion Air crash, pilots disconnected the autopilot and corrected the plane’s trajectory.
One said the flight crew reviewed the incident “at length ... but can’t think of any reason the aircraft would pitch nosedown so aggressively”.
It is not known if US transport authorities review the database or investigate the incidents. However, the FAA said this week it had mandated that Boeing update its flight software and training on the aircraft.
Questions about the Lion Air crash honed in on an automated stall-prevention system, the MCAS, designed to automatically point the nose of the plane downward if it is in danger of stalling.
According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the MCAS repeatedly pushed the plane’s nose down after take-off.
The Ethiopian Airlines pilots reported similar difficulties before their aircraft plunged into the ground as they tried to return to the airport.
Andrew Hunter, a defence industry expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that while Boeing and the FAA had good track records on addressing safety concerns, sometimes the combination of automated systems and people did not work smoothly.
“It is hard to get a system to work seamlessly with human beings,” he told AFP.