ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Ethiopian investigators said on Thursday that the pilots of a doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight repeatedly followed procedures recommended by Boeing but were still unable to recover before the plane dived into the ground last month.
The crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10 followed the unrecoverable nose-dive almost five months earlier of another jet of the same model, a Boeing 737 Max 8, in Indonesia. Indonesian investigators have implicated a malfunctioning automated anti-stall program in that disaster, in which the plane’s computer system appeared to override pilot directions based on faulty data.
The investigators’ initial findings on Thursday, based on analysis from 18 Ethiopian and international investigators and information from the jet’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, were released several hours after a news conference held by Ethiopia’s minister of transportation.
The report said that pilot-side sensor readings connected to the computer system varied wildly and affected everything from their understanding of the plane’s pitch to its airspeed.