Ethiopian Airlines And Lion Air Crashes Show Striking Similarities, Reveal Investigators

The Federal Aviation Administration of the United States has discovered stark similarities between the Ethiopian aircraft crash and the Lion air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people. This discovery has led the agency to ground all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes for weeks.

In an emergency order, the US lawmakers said that both the disasters posed a probability of a shared cause that needs to be better understood and addressed. The planes will remain grounded until a software upgrade can be tested and installed.

US President Donald Trump said that America was also grounding the Boeing 737 Max planes immediately and all the pilots, airlines have been notified.

Photo: AFP/Boeing MAX 737 7 plane (File Photo)

An Ethiopian Airline flight bound to Nairobi crashed on Sunday and all 149 passengers including eight crew members on board were killed. Investigators from France will begin analysing the black boxes from a jet that crashed in Ethiopia.

The pilot of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 had reported internal control problems and received permission to return, before the plane came down and burst into a fireball on an arid farmland.

Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw had told CNN the "black box" data recorders recovered would "definitely be going to Europe," as Ethiopia does not have the necessary equipment to analyze that data.

Photo: Reuters/Man walks past debris of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, near Addis Ababa

Reuters reported Boeing has said it would roll out the software improvement ¡°across the 737 MAX fleet in the coming weeks.¡± Relatives of the dead stormed out of a meeting with Ethiopian Airlines on Thursday, decrying a lack of transparency, while others made the painful trip to the crash scene.

¡°We continue to build 737 MAX airplanes while assessing how the situation, including potential capacity constraints, will impact our production system,¡± Boeing spokesman Chaz Bickers said.

Around 5,000 MAX planes are currently operational which means the financial implications are huge for the aviation industry.

Photo: AFP/ Family members mourn the death of their loved ones in the Ethiopia crash

Lion Air Flight 610 was a domestic flight operated by the Indonesian airline Lion Air between Jakarta and Pangkal Pinang on October 29, 2018 around 12 minutes after taking off. The crash was the first worldwide of Boeing Co¡¯s new 737 MAX jet.

The Indonesian Lion Air crash is still underway. A preliminary report by KNKT in November, before the retrieval of the cockpit voice recorder, focused on maintenance and training and the response of a Boeing anti-stall system to a recently replaced sensor, but gave no reason for the crash.

Boeing¡¯s stock is down about 11 percent since the Sunday crash, wiping more than $26 billion off its market value. It fell 1 percent on Thursday.