Once the black boxes from Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 were recovered, Ethiopia’s air accident investigators had a dilemma. Which country should they go to?
Ethiopia itself lacks the ability to read the data from the flight recorders. According to the Wall Street Journal (paywall), US air safety officials were negotiating with Ethiopia to have the black boxes from the plane, which crashed after taking off from Addis Ababa en route to Nairobi, downloaded by the National Transportation Safety Board in the US for analysis.
In the end, they went to France’s Bureau of Investigation and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety, or BEA. A spokesman for the BEA confirmed to Quartz that the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder arrived in France Thursday morning (March 14) en route to BEA’s facility.
The Ethiopian Airlines flight using a Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft crashed Sunday (March 10) just minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board. The airline said the following day that both black boxes had been recovered. The crash was the second deadly one for a 737 Max 8, after a Lion Air flight crashed in Indonesia on Oct. 29 last year, killing 189 people.
Ethiopia had considered sending the black boxes to the UK and Germany, but Germany said it didn’t have the capability of reading the recorders, which have new software, from the 737 Max planes.
The US Federal Aviation Administration’s decisions to not to require specific training on a new 737 Max anti-stall flight system, and to be among the last of dozens of nations to ground the plane, have shone a spotlight on the agency in recent days. Under president Donald Trump, it has been led by officials in an acting capacity since the departure of FAA administrator Michael Huerta in January 2018, and its work with Boeing on a software change to the Max’s anti-stall system in response to the Lion Air crash was put on hold during the 35-day government shutdown (paywall).
On Wednesday, after China and Europe had grounded the plane, the FAA said it would suspend the plane’s operations, citing new data from the site of the Ethiopian crash and newly refined satellite data that “align or track” with the final flight path of Lion Air flight JT610.
France’s BEA has worked with Ethiopia’s air safety officials to investigate crashes in the past. In the case of ET 409, a flight from Beirut carrying mostly Ethiopian and Lebanese passengers that crashed in the Mediterranean in 2010, the BEA worked with investigators (pdf) from Lebanon, Ethiopia, and the US to locate, recover, and analyze the black boxes.
The black boxes in the Ethiopian 302 crash were recovered far more quickly than in the case of the Lion Air jet, which crashed into the sea. That flight data recorder was recovered three days after the crash, while the cockpit voice recorder was recovered months later, in January.
Read more of Quartz’s coverage of the Boeing 737 Max crisis.