Ethiopian Airlines sends black boxes of crashed Boeing to Paris
Thursday March 14 2019
Debris of the crashed airplane of Ethiopia Airlines, near Bishoftu, a town some 60 kilometres southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on March 11, 2019. Addis does not have the equipment to analyse the plane's black boxes. PHOTO | MICHAEL TEWELDE | AFP
Ethiopian Airlines said Thursday that the black box flight recorders from the Boeing 737 MAX 8 that crashed with 157 people on board have been flown to Paris for analysis.
"An Ethiopian delegation led by Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) has flown the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) to Paris, France for investigation," the airline wrote on Twitter.
Urgency is mounting to determine the causes of Sunday's crash as Boeing finds its entire fleet of the model grounded after it emerged the plane experienced similar difficulties to an Indonesian Lion Air flight in October, which also crashed minutes after takeoff.
Ethiopia said it does not have the equipment to process the data and Germany said it would not analyse the boxes as it was unable to read the software used by Boeing.
US Federal Aviation Administration acting chief Daniel Elwell said the black box flight data recorders had been damaged.
In Kenya, which lost 32 citizens in the crash, a minute of silence was observed Thursday morning at the One Planet Summit on climate change attended by French President Emmanuel Macron.