Ethiopia says committed to aviation safety as it releases first crash report

The government is committed to aviation safety, Ethiopian Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges said on Thursday (April 4) as it released the first official report on the Boeing MAX 8 airplane crash that killed 157 people on March 10.

Moges said that one of the main objectives of the report was safety in the air and that the government would work towards that goal for ‘all people of the world’.

Ethiopian investigators urged Boeing to review its flight control system and said pilots of state carrier Ethiopian Airlines had carried out proper procedures in the first official findings on the crash.

The doomed flight repeatedly nosedived as the pilots battled to control the nearly full aircraft before it crashed six minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa in clear conditions, Ethiopian authorities said on Thursday.

Boeing’s top-selling aircraft has been grounded worldwide since the March 10 disaster, which came just five months after a Lion Air 737 MAX crash in Indonesia that killed 189. An initial report into that accident also raised questions about the jet’s software, as well as training and maintenance.

Families of the victims, regulators and travellers around the world have been waiting for signs of whether the two crashes are linked, and the extent to which Boeing technology and the actions of the Ethiopian Airlines pilots played a role.