All 157 people aboard a flight to Nairobi were killed within minutes after take-off when the brand new Boeing 737 Max malfunctioned and plummeted from the sky....CONTINUE READING
Ethiopian Airlines ET302 crashed after leaving Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019, killing British humanitarian workers Samuel Pegram, 25, Oliver Vick, 45, and sustainability campaigner Joanna Toole, 36, among others. The aircraft was just four months old.
The Ethiopian Airplane Accident Investigation Bureau found a flying control system on the aircraft had malfunctioned, which caused the plane to start a “repetitive and uncommandable” nose dive that the pilots could not control, read an inquest report from December 2022.
It was further revealed that “safety critical” information on the control system and awareness of the mechanism was deliberately not disclosed by two Boeing company pilots, which led to a lower level of training being needed to operate the planes, reports the Independent.
Senior coroner Penelope Schofield concluded the victims of the plane crash that claimed the lives of 157 had been killed “unlawfully” and Boeing was fined $2.3billion US dollars (£1.8billion) in 2021 after it was discovered the actions of its workers had misled regulators about the control system.
The coroner said a contributing factor in the victims’ deaths was Boeing failing to provide procedures to operate the system in a flight crew manual, adding information requested by Ethiopian Airlines’ training department was “incomplete”. She added had the information been provided this would have “significantly altered the outcome”.
The family of a fourth UK national killed in the crash, Abdulqadir Qasim, 46, were at the inquest in Horsham, West Sussex, but the man was not formally recorded as he was not repatriated back to the UK.
Coroner Ms Schofield said: “We should not forget the 157 people who cruelly lost their lives. This huge loss will be borne by their families and friends all around the world.
“The process has taken over four years, it’s been a long and difficult journey. I hope through this process, you (the families) felt you had a voice.”
The tragedy came just a few months after another Boeing 737 Max plane, operated by Lion Air Max, crashed in Indonesia killing all 189 people on board.
