Ethiopia snubs FAA, sends ‘black boxes’ from crashed Boeing 737 Max to France
LA TimesBloomberg Ethiopia has sent the “black box” recording devices from a crashed Boeing 737 Max jet to France for analysis after refusing to hand them over to U.S. authorities, who had kept the Max model flying after most other regulators had grounded it. Boeing’s $600-billion-plus backlog for the 737 Max is also looking shaky after several big customers reconsidered their purchases, among them VietJet Aviation JSC, which doubled its order to about $25 billion last month, and Lion Air, operator of the plane in the Indonesia crash, which plans to drop a $22-billion deal, according to a person with knowledge of the plan. Indonesia will send two officials to Addis Ababa as observers of the crash investigation, and will share data and insights from its own probe into the loss of Lion Air flight 610 in October, according to Soerjanto Tjahjono, chairman of the country’s National Transportation Safety Committee. A rift opened between Lion Air and Boeing when the U.S. company said the disaster could have been avoided if pilots had followed procedure, though it has since cooperated positively with Indonesia in the probe, according to Tjahjono, who said Indonesia’s aviation investigators haven’t received any reports of further malfunctions concerning the Max.