Ethiopian Airlines resumes flying Boeing 737 MAX planes — three years after deadly crash

February 1, 2022 6:26 pm

An Ethiopia’s Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 plane to take off on a demonstration trip to resume flights from the Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia February 1, 2022. REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri

Ethiopian Airlines, on Tuesday, resumed flying Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, nearly three years after a fatal crash prompted global grounding of the model.

In March 2019, Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 bound for Kenya, crashed six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, killing all 149 passengers and eight crew members.

TheCable had reported that Pius Adesanmi, a Nigeria-born Canadian professor and Abiodun Bashua, a retired foreign service officer, were among the passengers that lost their lives on the ill-fated flight.

The crash was the second involving Boeing 737 MAX 8 model — a Lion Air plane of the same model crashed in Indonesia in October 2018, killing 189 people.

The two crashes had forced several countries, including Nigeria, to ban the model.

But in February 2021, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) lifted the ban and certified the aircraft to resume operations on Nigeria’s airspace.

On Tuesday, the aircraft took off from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport (ADD) and flew around the Ethiopian airspace for a couple of hours.

Ethiopian Airlines, in a statement, said the decision to resume 737 MAX flights came “after intense recertification” by regulatory bodies in different countries.

“We have taken enough time to monitor the design modification work and the more than 20 months of rigorous rectification process … our pilots, engineers, aircraft technicians, cabin crew are confident of the safety of the fleet,” Reuters quoted Tewolde Gebremariam, the airline’s CEO, as saying.