Evidence mounts
‘Clear’ link in dual Boeing crashes
Black-box data from the Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed last week, killing all 157 aboard, reveal a “clear similarity” to the Indonesian air disaster in October that involved the same jet model, an official said Sunday.
Ethiopia’s transport minister, Dagmawit Moges, made the claim but didn’t elaborate on the similarities uncovered by the jet’s data and cockpit voice recorders, adding only that the government plans to release its findings in a month.
Both doomed aircraft were Boeing 737 MAX 8s (like those at right), and satellite tracking shows they suffered from the same wildly erratic up-anddown movements just after takeoff and before their fatal plunges as their pilots desperately tried to turn around and return to their respective airports.
In the case of the crash involving a MAX 8 from Indonesia-based Lion Air — which went down on Oct. 28, minutes after taking off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people aboard — probers have zeroed in on the jet model’s automated anti-stalling setup, called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.
The system is supposed to work by forcing the nose of the craft down to prevent it from entering a stall — but in the case of Lion Air, there are indications that it malfunctioned and the pilots spent their final moments trying to shut it down before the plane plummeted into the Java Sea.
The FAA has said evidence shows that flight and the Ethiopian Airlines crash were similar in terms of their uncontrolled ascent.
“It became clear that the track of the Ethiopian flight was very close and behaved very similar to the Lion Air flight,” the Federal Aviation Administration’s acting administrator, Daniel Elwell, said last week.
After the crash in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city, some countries and airlines immediately grounded their fleets of the Boeing 737 MAX 8s, the company’s best-selling aircraft.
The FAA initially held out, then finally changed course Wednesday after “new evidence” was analyzed, Elwell said.
Moges said the Ethiopian plane’s recording devices were found “in good condition’’ and that authorities were able “to ex- tract almost all the data inside.”
Both of its recorders were sent to French air-accident investigation agency BEA for analysis.
Meanwhile, thousands of people participated in a mass memorial in Addis Ababa on Sunday as mourners carried empty caskets.
The caskets were a symbolic protest after authorities said that identifying the remains of all of the victims of the Ethiopian Airlines crash would take several months.