France to investigate crashed Ethiopian Airline's black boxes

The black boxes retrieved from the Boeing 737 MAX 8 that crashed with 157 people on board, was on Thursday sent to France for examination.

"An Ethiopian delegation led by Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) has flown the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) to Paris, France for investigation," the airline wrote on Twitter.

Authorities in Ethiopia told Al Jazeera that the East African country lacks adequate resources required to carry out a detailed investigation of the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) that would further determine the cause of the disaster.

The black boxes will be examined by France's BEA (Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety) air accident investigation agency.

 

France's decision came after Germany's Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU) on Wednesday declined to examine the black boxes of the crashed airline.

"This is a new type of aircraft with a new black box, with new software. We can't do it," Gulf News quoted BFU spokesperson Germout Freitag as saying.

On the same day, Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde GebreMariam said in a statement that the black boxes of the crashed plane would be sent to a "closer country in Europe" rather than the United States for examination.

"It could also be sent to a closer country in Europe in the interest of proximity and in the interest of speed," he added.

Several countries including Australia, Singapore, the UK, Ireland, France, India, Egypt and the Netherlands have also disallowed the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft from operation in its airspace. A host of carriers like Jet Airways, Ethiopian Airlines, Aeromexico, and Turkish Airlines have also grounded their fleets containing the said aircraft, citing customer safety.

The groundings of Boeing 737 MAX flights came after the Ethiopian Airlines said that one of two pilots on the ill-fated flight number 302 had reported "flight-control problems" to air traffic controllers, minutes after the plane crashed after taking off from Addis Ababa.

The pilot told the controllers that he wanted to turn back to the Addis Ababa airport, which he was cleared to do so, three minutes before contact was lost with the cockpit, a spokesperson for the Ethiopian Airlines said.