SUNDAY TIMES WEB DESK:Some 35 nationalities were among the 157 passengers and crew who died when the nearly full plane crashed six minutes after take-off from the capital Addis Ababa in clear conditions.
The March 10 disaster prompted the worldwide grounding of Boeing’s best-selling plane and scrutiny of its certification process.
“The 10:30 AM (0730 GMT) press conference is to present the preliminary report,” Ethiopian transport ministry spokesperson Musie Yehyies said.
The report may shed light on how a piece of cockpit software came back to life after pilots initially switched it off as they tried to save the doomed jet, people familiar with the matter said, placing both technology and crew in the spotlight.
The Ethiopian-led investigation has begun piecing together details of flight 302, starting with faulty sensor data on take-off from Addis Ababa, questions over the Boeing 737 MAX’s high speed and a nosedive coinciding with the software re-activation.
The aircraft’s high speed and initial climb suggest the engines were running at a higher than usual thrust, experts say.
The so-called MCAS anti-stall software is at the centre of accident probes in both the Ethiopian crash and October’s Lion Air accident in Indonesia that have together killed 346 people.
MCAS was designed to help prevent an aerodynamic stall by issuing commands to push the plane’s nose lower. However, in both cases, it is suspected of firing up in response to faulty airflow data from a single sensor designed to measure the ‘angle of attack,’ a parameter needed to avoid stalling or losing lift.