Ethiopia inspectors didn't pay attention to important aspects in Boeing 737-MAX crash: US experts

Ethiopian inspectors who investigated the Ethiopian Airlines' Boeing 737-MAXcrash did notpay enough attention to aspects like crew training and emergency procedures, said US air safety experts. The crash killed nearly 160 people.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 crash had resulted in grounding of similar aircrafts from Boeing, an American company.

Fight 302 crashed shortly after take-off from Addis Ababa in March 2019, killing all 157 people on board.

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Ethiopia's Aircraft Investigation Bureau, hadlast Friday, released its long-delayed report. The report said that "uncommanded" inputs from Boeing's Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) wereresponsible for the crash.

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.

The NTSB, however, in its comments, said that it it found the faulty sensor may have been damaged by a bird strike soon after take-off. This assertion was ignored by Ethiopian investigators.

The Ethiopian report said that the country's inspectors didn't find evidence of in-flight damage to sensor due to physical clues like a dead bird.

The NTSB, however, said the sensor was never recovered at the crash site in spite of a partial search by both sides a week after the accident.

Boeing has previously said the MCAS was a safety feature and the issues identified after the crash of flight 302, which followed one of a similar plane in Indonesia five months earlier, have been rectified.

The NTSB also accused their Ethiopian counterparts of focusing on the contributions of the design issues to the accident at the expense of the crew's own training and reaction to the emergency that arose.

"Discussion of crew resource management and performance were still not sufficiently developed in the draft final report," the NTSB said.

In their report, the Ethiopian investigators found that the crew members were licensed and qualified for flight in accordance with the existing Ethiopian Civil Aviation Rules and Standards, but were startled by the unprecedented change of events and "confusing alerts", and blamed it all on the plane's design.

(With inputs from agencies)

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