‘Clear similarities’ in Boeing crashes, says Ethiopia official

ETHIOPIA said yesterday that the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 people had “clear similarities” with October’s Lion Air crash, according to analysis of the black boxes recovered from the wreckage of the March 10 disaster.

Both planes were Boeing 737 MAX 8s, and both crashed minutes after take-off after pilots reported flight control problems.

Concern over the plane’s safety caused aviation authorities worldwide to ground the model, wiping billions of dollars off Boeing’s market value.

Investigators are trying to determine why the aircraft plunged into a field shortly after take off from Addis Ababa, searching for possible similarities to a Lion Air crash in October last year that killed 189 people.

“It was the same case with the Indonesian [Lion Air] one. There were clear similarities between the two crashes so far,” said Muse Yiheyis, an Ethiopian transport ministry spokesman.

“The data was successfully recovered. Both the American team and our [Ethiopian] team validated it. The minister thanked the French government.

“We will let you know more after three or four days,” he told Reuters.

In Washington, US officials told Reuters that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) had not yet validated the data.

When investigators, after reviewing black box data, return to Addis Ababa and start conducting interpretive work, the NTSB and FAA will assist in verification of the data, an official said.

In Paris, France’s BEA air accident investigation agency said data from the jet’s cockpit voice recorder had been successfully downloaded.

The French agency said in a tweet it had not listened to the audio files and that the data had been transferred to Ethiopian investigators.