The flight recorders, more commonly know as black boxes, from the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed last Sunday have been sent to France for analysis.
France’s air accident investigation agency BEA will analyse the flight recorders from the Boeing 737 MAX 8 which crashed near Addis Ababa on Sunday.
The French announcement resolved uncertainty over the fate of the two recorders after Germany’s BFU said it had declined a request to handle them because it could not process the new type of recorder used on the 737 MAX jets, in service since 2017.
The BEA is one of the world’s most active air crash agencies alongside the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States and has laboratories at its Le Bourget headquarters.
In the meantime, Boeing has grounded its entire global fleet of 737 Max aircraft after investigators uncovered new evidence at the scene of the fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash.
The US plane-maker said it would suspend all 371 of the aircraft.
The Federal Aviation Administration said fresh evidence as well as newly refined satellite data prompted the decision to temporarily ban the jets.
Asrat Begashaw, a spokesman for Ethiopia Airlines, told Reuters the pilot had reported flight control problems and had requested to turn back to Addis Ababa shortly before disaster struck.
The still unexplained crash, just after take-off from Addis Ababa, followed another disaster involving a Boeing 737 MAX in Indonesia five months ago that killed 189 people.
Though there is no evidence of links, the twin disasters have spooked passengers worldwide, led to the grounding of most of Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft, and sending shares in the world’s biggest plane maker plunging.
