The black boxes of the Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed on March 10 have been accepted by France for analysing as investigations into the tragedy that saw 157 lives lost continue.
International news agencies reported that France’s air accident investigation agency BEA had accepted to analyse the black-box flight recorders from the Boeing 737 MAX 8 that crashed on Sunday. Earlier, Germany had refused to analyse the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) which had been recovered from the plane’s crash site.
The BEA, which in full stands for Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses pour la securite de l’aviation, is known as one of the busiest air accident investigation agencies in the world. It is headquartered at the Le Bourget airport in Paris, France.
According to Reuters, the black boxes from the Ethiopian Airlines plane are in France but not yet in the possession of BEA, as at the time of writing.
This also comes as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the USA became the latest to ground the Boeing 737 Max 8.
A total of 50 countries, including Ethiopia, China, Indonesia, UK, France and Germany have grounded the plane which has so far has seen its model crash twice in the space of four months, claiming a total of 346 lives.
The FAA said that it made this decision “as a result of data gathering process and new evidence collected and analysed at the site” of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines plane.
[Read: Journalist who died in Ethiopian Airlines crash mourned as defender of media freedom]
“The grounding will remain in effect pending further investigation including examination of information from the aircraft’s flight data recorders,” the FAA said.
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