Ethiopia says black-box data like past crash’s

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Information from the data and voice recorders from an Ethiopian Airlines jet that crashed last weekend shows similarities to an earlier crash of the same type of Boeing plane used by an Indonesian airline, Ethiopia’s transport ministry said.

A ministry spokesman would not say what the similarities were but said that details of the investigation will be revealed later.

The flight data adds to earlier indications that the Boeing 737 Max 8 used by Ethiopian Airlines might have had problems similar to those of the Indonesian plane, a Lion Air flight that crashed in October.

The second crash led to a worldwide grounding of Max 8s, Boeing’s bestselling aircraft. Although American regulators were slow to ground the planes in the United States, they said physical evidence from the Ethiopian crash, along with satellite tracking data, suggested similarities between the two crashes.

Publicly available data on the Ethiopian jet’s flight path, and early findings from the debris collected after it crashed, are consistent with the possibility that the software system that is the central focus of the Indonesian crash might have been involved. That system, called MCAS, was installed in the new Max 8 planes as a way of preventing stalls and worked by forcing the nose of the planes down.

In the Ethiopian flight, just as with Lion Air, public data on the flight appears to show repeated up-anddown oscillations lasting 15 to 20 seconds — a possible indication that pilots overrode the nose-down push by MCAS, only to see it activate again. For Lion Air, those oscillations were later confirmed by data from the flight recorders, or black boxes.

The Wall Street Journal first reported Sunday that the Ethiopians said the jet’s flight data recorders showed similarities to the Indonesian flight.