The French air safety investigation authority for civil aviation (BEA) has accused the Ethiopian Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (EAIB) of failing to directly include its comments in appendix the final report of the Boeing 737 crash investigation released on 23rd December 2022. Instead, the BEA says the EAIB report contains a link to a BEA document that does not contain the comments that the BEA had finally requested to be appended.
It adds that this is beside the Ethiopian authorities having requested the assistance of the BEA for the analysis of the FDR and CVR which were damaged where the BEA appointed an accredited representative investigator to participate in the investigation conducted by Ethiopia as State of Occurrence.
ICAO Annex 13 provides that the State conducting the investigation shall send a copy of the draft final report to the participating States (in this case to the accredited representative of the BEA for France and to that of the NTSB for the United States). These States are then invited to provide as soon as possible their significant and substantiated comments on the report. If the State conducting the investigation receives comments within 60 days, it shall either amend the draft final report to include the substance of the observations received or, in the event of disagreement on them, and if desired by the State that provided the comments, append the comments to the final report.
From January 2021, the NTSB and the BEA were consulted on a draft of the final report. The NTSB and the BEA requested in particular that the aspects related to the performance of the crew be better exposed and analysed. These exchanges did not result in satisfying amendments to the final report and led the NTSB and the BEA to request that their comments be appended to the final report.
The BEA shares the analysis and conclusions of the EAIB report regarding the contribution of the MCAS system of the 737 Max to the accident. BEA’s comments are mainly related to the analysis of the crew’s performance and its contribution to the accident scenario, in particular during the first part of the flight (between the rupture of the angle of attack vane and the activation of the MCAS system). The BEA considers that this analysis would make it possible to draw safety lessons beyond those related to the MCAS system.
The accusation comes days after the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) took the unusual step of publishing the comments on its website after Ethiopia’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (EAIB) failed to include the NTSB’s comments in its final report on its investigation into the March 10, 2019, crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, a Boeing 737-800 MAX.