France Is Not Handling Ethiopian Air-Crash Analysis

(Bloomberg) -- France’s civil aviation safety authority won’t be analyzing flight-recorder data from the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed earlier this month, killing all aboard the Boeing Co. 737 Max aircraft, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

No reason was given for the decision, which could be announced as soon as late Wednesday by Ethiopian authorities, said the person, who asked not be be named because the information isn’t public.

Analyzing the data is a step further than the decoding France’s Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses has already carried out, and while Ethiopia is overseeing the investigation of the crash, agencies including the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board have also been providing technical assistance.

French experts at the BEA outside Paris successfully downloaded the voice and data recordings after officials in the East African country refused to hand them to the U.S. Officials in Boeing’s home country had kept the model flying after most other regulators had grounded it, heightening scrutiny on U.S. regulators and raising questions about the certification process for the 737 Max, which debuted less than two years ago.

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, killing 157 people. The disaster occurred less than five months after another 737 Max operated by Indonesia’s Lion Air plunged into the Java Sea with 189 aboard. Information recovered from the flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders at BEA laboratories led Ethiopia’s transport minister to announce “clear similarities” between the two doomed flights.

The raw material was sent back to Ethiopian investigators this week. A spokesman for BEA deferred questions about the probe to that country’s authorities. A spokesman for Ethiopia’s civil aviation authority declined to comment on how the probe will be handled.

Ethiopian Airlines had said the initial decision to send the black boxes to Europe was strategic after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration was left isolated in the days after the crash, arguing that the Max should continue flying. The U.S. regulator finally grounded the aircraft a week ago amid mounting concern about similarities between the African tragedy and the one in Indonesia, in which a computer system took control of the flight.

The NTSB, the FAA and Boeing took part in the technical work done at the BEA. The French agency has handled other fatal air disaster investigations in the past including for Air France Flight 447, which was lost in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, and Germanwings Flight 9525, which was flown into the mountain in 2015 by its co-pilot.

--With assistance from Nizar Manek and Ryan Beene.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tara Patel in Paris at tpatel2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Palazzo at apalazzo@bloomberg.net, Brendan Case

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