ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — A new Ethiopian Airlines Boeing jet crashed last month after experiencing “repetitive, uncommanded aircraft nose-down conditions,” Ethiopia’s transportation minister said on Thursday as she explained investigators’ initial findings about the accident. The crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10 followed the unrecoverable nose-dive five months earlier of another jet of the same model, a Boeing 737 Max 8, in Indonesia. Indonesian investigators have implicated a malfunctioning automated anti-stall program in that disaster, in which the plane’s computer system appeared to override pilot directions based on faulty data. The preliminary report into the Ethiopian Airlines crash is based on analysis from 18 Ethiopian and international investigators and information from the jet’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, the so-called black boxes that are designed to survive aviation accidents. It was the first official investigation into the doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight, and the news conference on its findings included few details, but it confirmed some initial suspicions about the crash.

Source: Ethiopian News April 04, 2019 09:33 UTC