NAIROBI (Reuters) – U.S. air safety experts say Ethiopian inspectors investigating the reason behind an Ethiopian Airlines’ crash that killed nearly 160 people in 2019 didn’t pay enough attention to crew training and emergency procedures of their report.
The USA National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), in dissenting comments included within the Ethiopian report, disagreed with a minimum of two key findings of the investigation into the crash of a Boeing 737-MAX flight.
The accident led to the grounding of comparable jets. The NTSB is involved as Boeing is a U.S. company.
Fight 302 crashed shortly after take-off from Addis Ababa in March 2019, killing all 157 people on board.
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, generally known as MCAS.
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The inputs, which were brought on by faulty data from an underlying sensor, sent the plane’s nose down repeatedly, resulting in lack of control because the pilots tried to take care of several warnings within the cabin, the report said.
But in its comments, the NTSB said it found the faulty sensor can have been damaged by a bird strike soon after take-off, an assertion that was ignored by the Ethiopian investigators.
The Ethiopians didn’t find any evidence that the sensor was damaged in flight on account of lack of any physical clues like a dead bird within the vicinity of the flight’s path, their report said.
The NTSB, nevertheless, said the sensor was never recovered on the crash site despite a partial search by either side per week after the accident.
Boeing has previously said the MCAS was a security feature and the problems identified after the crash of flight 302, which followed certainly one of an analogous plane in Indonesia five months earlier, have been rectified.
The NTSB also accused their Ethiopian counterparts of specializing in the contributions of the design issues to the accident on the expense of the crew’s own training and response to the emergency that arose.
“Discussion of crew resource management and performance were still not sufficiently developed within the draft final report,” the NTSB said.
The pilots were speculated to manually reduce throttle after the erroneous feeds from the sensor interfered with the expected automatic sequence, it said.
Of their report, the Ethiopian investigators found that the crew members were licensed and qualified for flight in accordance with the prevailing Ethiopian Civil Aviation Rules and Standards, but were startled by the unprecedented change of events and “confusing alerts”, and blamed all of it on the plane’s design.
“Flight crew situational awareness and skill to perceive every thing to the detail was greatly affected with the ever changing flight scenario and unsettling warnings and flight deck effects,” the report said.
The investigation bureau referred Reuters to NTSB’s statement when asked for further comments.
The accident involving Flight 302 followed one other incident five months earlier, when the identical model crashed in Indonesia, killing 189 people.
The accidents exposed an issue with a system on the plane, and the model was grounded worldwide, costing Boeing some $20 billion and prompting court cases that exposed shortcomings with the certification process.
Operators have since resumed flying the 737-MAX after the plane’s 20-month grounding. Ethiopia was among the many last countries to return the 737 MAX to service.
(Reporting by Nairobi Newsroom; Additional reporting by David Shepardson in Washington; Writing by Duncan Miriri; Editing by James Macharia Chege and Angus MacSwan)
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