The United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has announced that Ethiopian Airlines lied about the cause of the 2019 crash.
The Boeing 737 Max crash killed all the 157 passengers on board as it crashed outside Addis Ababa.
According to the NTSB, Ethiopian authorities falsely claimed the jetliner had an electrical failure and the report comes in a highly unusual public rebuttal of the nation’s findings about the fatal accident.
Additionally, the NTSB said the Ethiopian Accident Investigation Bureau made claims “unsupported by evidence” in conclusions belatedly published late last year.
“The final report does not provide any details to support the EAIB’s statements about the existence of an electrical problem,” the NTSB wrote on Tuesday.
US investigators said they agreed generally with Ethiopia’s findings that a flawed design in the 737 Max pushed the nose down automatically and was at least part of the cause of the March 10, 2019 crash that killed 157 people.
It was the second fatal accident involving the model in a matter of months and led to its worldwide grounding, thus also leading to billions of dollars in losses to Boeing and multiple investigations.
The NTSB also alleged that the Ethiopians ignored numerous other factors in particular, the Ethiopian Airlines Group crew had been told how to counteract a failure of the flawed software known as Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, after a crash off the coast of Indonesia about four months earlier.
Amdeye Fenta, chief of the Ethiopian AIB, said the group is preparing a response.
Despite the Ethiopian report saying there were “unexplained electrical and electronic faults” and “production quality defects”, the NTSB said there was no evidence of such electronic issues.
Instead, the failure was most likely triggered by an impact with a bird just as the plane lifted off, the NTSB said per Engineering News.
That and another jet’s impact with a bird at Addis Ababa Bole International Airport raised safety concerns that were ignored.
“Ethiopian investigators didn’t look for bird remains or other evidence of such a collision until eight days after the accident and never bothered to look in the area of the runway where the impact occurred,” said the NTSB.
