‘Black Box’ Recorders Found In Ethiopian Airlines Crash Of Boeing 737 Max 8 Jet

Search crews have recovered both the digital flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 — the jet that crashed near Addis Ababa on Sunday morning, killing all 157 people on board.


The Boeing 737 Max 8 was carrying 149 passengers and 8 crew members when it left Ethiopia’s capital city at 8:38 a.m. local time, headed for Nairobi. About six minutes later it crashed in a field near Bishoftu, some 35 miles southeast of Addis Ababa. Scenes from the site Sunday morning showed a large crater or deep furrow in the earth, under what look to be clear skies.

It’s the second disaster involving a Max 8 aircraft in less than six months, prompting China and Indonesia to ground their fleets of the jets. Last October, 189 people died when a Lion Air jet fell into the Java Sea after departing Jakarta, Indonesia. In both cases, new Boeing planes crashed shortly after taking off — and after their pilots had contacted the control tower to request an emergency return.

“The [Ethiopian Airlines] plane was seesawing — it was gaining altitude and then dropping, gaining altitude and dropping,” NPR’s Eyder Peralta reports from Nairobi, citing data from flight tracking websiteFlightradar24.