France probes 737 MAX black boxes as Boeing halts deliveries
Paris: A French investigation into the Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash that killed 157 passengers and crew opened Friday as US aerospace giant Boeing stopped delivering the top-selling aircraft.
The MAX has been grounded worldwide following the disaster — the second involving the model in five months — and the fallout has left the company, regulators and airlines scrambling to respond.
"We are pausing the delivery of the 737 MAX until we come up with a solution," a Boeing spokesman said Thursday, adding: "We are going to continue the production but we are assessing our capacities." An Ethiopian delegation delivered the black boxes to France's BEA air safety agency "and the investigation process has started in Paris", Ethiopian Airlines said Friday on Twitter.
The BEA confirmed it had received the black box recorders from the plane, which was just four months old and crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on Sunday.
BEA investigators will now try to retrieve information from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, which were damaged in the disaster.
Thousands of miles (kilometers) away, distraught families were demanding answers as they visited the deep black crater where the plane smashed into a field outside the capital, disintegrating on impact.
Ethiopian Airlines, Africa's largest carrier, sent the black boxes to France because it does not have the equipment to analyze the data.
The information that they contain helps explain 90 percent of all crashes, according to aviation experts.
On Wednesday, US authorities said new evidence showed similarities between the Ethiopia crash and that of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia in October that killed 189 people.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said findings from the crash site and "newly refined satellite data" warranted "further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents."
An FAA emergency order grounded 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft until further notice, effectively taking the aircraft out of the skies globally.
The move came after a growing number of airlines and countries decided not to fly the planes or ban them from their airspace until it is determined there are no safety issues.
US President Donald Trump told reporters the "safety of the American people and all peoples is our paramount concern".
FAA acting chief Daniel Elwell said the agency had been "working tirelessly" to find the cause of the accident but faced delays because of the damage to the flight data recorders.
The new information shows "the track of that airplane was close enough to the track of the Lion Air flight" to warrant the grounding of the airplanes so more information can be gathered to determine if there is a link, Elwell said Wednesday on CNBC.
Boeing's shares have fallen 12 percent in the days after the crash in Ethiopia, wiping out nearly 30 billion in value.
The 737 MAX series is Boeing's fastest-selling model and it is still relatively new with fewer than 500 in service.
