Data indicate crashes alike, Ethiopia says

Plane victims’ caskets empty as mourners meet for funeral

A woman grieves over empty caskets draped with Ethiopian flags Sunday at a mass funeral at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa. Thousands of people attended the ceremony held in memory of the victims of last week’s Ethiopian Airlines crash.
A woman grieves over empty caskets draped with Ethiopian flags Sunday at a mass funeral at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa. Thousands of people attended the ceremony held in memory of the victims of last week’s Ethiopian Airlines crash.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia -- Preliminary information from the flight data recorder of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed more than a week ago shows "clear similarities" with an earlier disaster involving the same kind of Boeing aircraft near Indonesia, Ethiopia's transport minister said Sunday.

The disclosure about the Ethiopia crash, which killed all 157 people on board, came hours after mourners dressed in black streamed into the vast churchyard of the Holy Trinity Cathedral in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Thousands of people marched through the city, accompanying 17 caskets for a funeral. The caskets were empty because authorities have said that recovering and identifying the remains will take months.

The crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10 and that of a Lion Air plane off Indonesia in October -- both of them Boeing 737 Max 8 jetliners -- have prompted the United States and other countries to ground the aircraft.

The flight recorders from Flight 302, which went down shortly after takeoff on a trip from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya, were recovered "in a good condition that enabled us to extract almost all the data inside," Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges told reporters.

Information collected so far from the flight data recorder has indicated "clear similarities" between both crashes, she said. Both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder were sent to Paris for analysis by the French air accident investigation agency BEA.

Moges did not elaborate on what the similarities were, saying the Ethiopian government intends to release detailed findings within a month.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has said satellite-based tracking data showed that the movements of Flight 302 were similar to those of Lion Air Flight 610, which crashed in the Java Sea off the coast of Indonesia, killing 189 people.

Both planes were said to have flown with erratic altitude changes that could indicate the pilots struggled to control the aircraft. Shortly after their takeoffs, both crews tried to return to the airports but crashed.

Suspicions emerged that faulty sensors and software may have contributed to the crashes.

The Seattle Times reported Sunday that the FAA had delegated much of the aircraft model's 2015 safety assessment to Boeing and that the analysis the plane-maker in turn delivered to the authorities had crucial flaws.

The newspaper's report was based on interviews with current and former engineers directly involved or familiar with the evaluations, all of whom asked not to be identified.

Boeing told the newspaper Saturday that the U.S. regulator had reviewed the company's data on the plane and "concluded that it met all certification and regulatory requirements." The company, which is based in Chicago but designs and builds commercial jets in the Seattle area, said there are "some significant mischaracterizations" in the engineers' comments.

Boeing's system-safety analysis of the flight-control software understated the power of the system, the engineers told The Seattle Times. The newspaper said the analysis also failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded -- in essence, gradually ratcheting the horizontal stabilizer into a dive position.

FAA technical experts told the newspaper that as the agency's certification of the 737 Max proceeded, managers prodded them to speed up the process as development of the plane was nine months behind that of rival Airbus' A32neo.

Some relatives of the victims -- 18 of whom were Ethiopian -- have not blamed Boeing for the tragedy.

Samson Seyoum is a humanitarian worker who had lost a friend of two decades, Getnet Alemayehu, in the crash. A frequent flier on Ethiopian Airlines, he noted Boeing's long record of safety and its decadeslong partnership with the carrier, which is a source of fierce pride for the nation.

"I imagine this could have happened with any type of plane," he said. "It could have happened to any airline. I will continue to use the airline."

But Yonathan Menkir Kassa, a pilot and aviation writer who attended the memorial service, said Boeing had departed from its ethos of safety when it resisted global calls to ground the Max 8 planes immediately after the Ethiopia crash.

"Boeing should have admitted its fault and sided with passengers," Yonathan said. "Instead, it chose to be stubborn."

Many who attended Sunday's service said they did not expect to ever recover remains. Family members said they were each given a roughly 2-pound sack of scorched earth from the crash site. The victims died in a fiery explosion.

"They fell from the sky," one woman lamented of the crash victims while black vans carried the empty caskets into the churchyard, trailed by somber airline employees in green uniforms. "Where will I go with my questions?"

Families of the Ethiopian victims have visited the site of the crash to see the wreckage for themselves. The passengers aboard that day had come from more than 35 countries and included at least 22 employees of United Nations-affiliated agencies. Kenya suffered the single largest toll, with at least 32 dead.

In Addis Ababa, mourners had sat in tents all week to receive visitors, in keeping with Ethiopian tradition. At the memorial, priests chanted a prayer for the departed. The patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, Abune Mathias, called out the names of the nine Ethiopian passengers and seven airline employees -- including the captain, Yared Getachew, 29 -- whose lives were being honored.

A separate memorial was held at a Muslim burial site for the co-pilot, Ahmed Nur Mohammod Nur.

Later, while the empty caskets were lowered into the ground at the church, the captain's father, a dentist, muttered words of encouragement to other pilots who were there to offer their condolences. He looked dazed. His private grief had become a public fixture.

"I'm still processing it," said the captain's brother, Meno Getachew, 39, a corporate lawyer from Toronto who had flown in a day earlier. The loss has been especially hard for his father, he said, because the older man had relied heavily on his younger son, who had been "his right arm."

He added, "This is crushing."

Information for this article was contributed by Elias Meseret and Angela Charlton of The Associated Press; by Selam Gebrekidan of The New York Times; and by Rita Devlin Marier of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 03/18/2019

Upcoming Events