Analysis of the flight recorders of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines plane has begun, the airline said on Friday as the New York Times reported that the pilot requested permission “in a panicky voice” to return to the airport shortly after takeoff as the plane dipped up and down sharply and appeared to gain startling speed.
The report cited “a person who reviewed air traffic communications” from Sunday’s flight as saying that controllers noticed the plane was moving up and down by tens of meters.
An airline spokesman has said that the pilot was given permission to return.
Photo: AP
However, it crashed minutes later outside Addis Ababa, killing all 157 on board.
French authorities now have the plane’s flight data and voice recorders for analysis.
They have said that it was unclear whether data could be retrieved, as the data recorder appeared to show damage.
Ethiopian Airlines said that an Ethiopian delegation led by its chief accident investigator had arrived in Paris.
In Ethiopia, officials started taking DNA samples from victims’ family members to assist in identifying remains. The dead came from 35 countries.
Countries have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 as the US-based planemaker faces the challenge of proving that the airplanes are safe to fly amid suspicions that faulty software might have contributed to two crashes that killed 346 people within less than six months.
The decision to send the flight recorders to France was seen as a rebuke to the US, which held out longer than most other countries before grounding the jets.
The US National Transportation Safety Board has sent three investigators to help French authorities.
The US Federal Aviation Administration said that regulators had new data from satellite-based tracking showing that the movements of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were similar to those of Lion Air Flight 610.
That flight crashed into the Java Sea off Indonesia in October last year, killing 189 people.
The data showed that both planes flew with erratic altitude changes, which could indicate that the pilots struggled to control the aircraft. Both crews tried to return to the airport.
Boeing said that it supports the grounding of its airplanes as a precautionary step, while reiterating its “full confidence” in the safety of the 737 Max.
Engineers are making changes to the system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall if sensors detect that the jet’s nose is pointed too high and its speed is too slow, it said.
Boeing also announced that it had paused delivery of the Max, although the company plans to continue building the jets.
The Max is the latest upgrade to the Boeing 737 family. Because its engines are larger and heavier, they are placed higher and farther forward on the wings. That created concern that the plane might be slightly more prone to an aerodynamic stall if not flown properly, so Boeing developed software to prevent that.
Investigators looking into the Indonesian crash are examining whether the software automatically pushed the plane’s nose down repeatedly and whether the Lion Air pilots knew how to solve that problem.
Ethiopian Airlines said that its pilots received special training on the software.
At the crash site in Hejere, about 50km from Addis Ababa, searchers continued to pick through the debris. Blue plastic sheeting covered the wreckage of the plane. Students from an elementary school walked an hour-and-a-half to the site to pay respects.
Anxious family members began giving DNA samples and waited for news on the identification of remains. Members of Israel’s ZAKA emergency response team were granted access to the site for forensic work.
Kenyan citizen Pauline Gathu lost a brother.
“We were expecting that we will have our body well-kept, but we are amazed to hear that there is nothing, totally nothing,” she said. “And people are waiting for us to give them reports of what we have found, but we don’t have words, we don’t know what to do.”
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