US air safety experts say Ethiopian inspectors investigating the cause of an Ethiopian Airlines’ crash that killed nearly 160 people in 2019 did not pay enough attention to crew training and emergency procedures in their report…
The United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), in dissenting comments included in the Ethiopian report, disagreed with at least two key findings of the investigation into the crash of a Boeing 737-MAX flight, The accident led to the grounding of similar jets. The NTSB is involved as Boeing is a US company, Flight 302 crashed shortly after take-off from Addis Ababa in March 2019, killing all 157 people on board.
Long-delayed report
Ethiopia’s Aircraft Investigation Bureau released its long-delayed report last Friday. It blamed the accident on “uncommanded” inputs from Boeing’s Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System, known as MCAS, The inputs, which were caused by faulty data from an underlying sensor, sent the plane’s nose down repeatedly, leading to loss of control as the pilots tried to deal with several warnings in the cabin, the report said.
But in its comments, the NTSB said it found the faulty sensor may have been damaged by a bird strike soon after take-off, an assertion that was ignored by the Ethiopian investigators, The Ethiopians did not find any evidence that the sensor was damaged in flight due to lack of any physical clues like a dead bird in the vicinity of the flight’s path, their report said.
