Ethiopian Airlines fly A737 MAX for first time since 2019 crash
Ethiopian Airlines flew today a Boeing A737 MAX for the first time since the March 2019 crash, when 157 people died a few minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa.
The demonstration flight took off from the Ethiopian capital and travelled around Mount Kilimanjaro, carrying journalists, diplomats and officials aboard, Reuters reported.
While the victims’ relatives were against the resumption of the 737 MAX, the airline cited the model’s intense re-certification as the reason behind the inaugural flight.
In early November, Boeing reached a settlement with the victims’ families, accepting liability for the crash – which was cause by a failure in the technology that brings the plane’s nose down, but asking the families not to seek punitive damages, CityAM reported.
The Ethiopian Airlines accident – which followed the Lion Air crash of October 2018, when 190 people died for the same faulty technology off the coast of Indonesia – prompted Boeing to ground the whole 737 MAX fleet for more than a year, bringing forward an investigation by the US Transport and Infrastructure Committee and Subcommittee.