Ethiopia Airlines set ‘to release crash report’

Ethiopia will release a preliminary report on Monday into the cause of an Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 last month, a foreign ministry spokesman said.

Flight 302 from Addis Ababa to Nairobi crashed six minutes after take off on March 10. Citizens of more than 30 nations were on board.

An anti-stalling system on the plane, a Boeing 737 Max, has been blamed for the disaster.

The report will be released by the Ministry of Transport, Nebiyat Getachew told Reuters, although a time had not yet been set.

Soon after take-off – and just 450ft (137m) above the ground – the aircraft’s nose began to pitch down.

One pilot, according to the Wall Street Journal, said to the other “pitch up, pitch up!” before their radio died.

Leaks last week from the crash investigation in Ethiopia and in the US suggest an automatic anti-stall system was activated at the time of the disaster.

The Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) flight-control feature was also implicated in a fatal crash involving a Lion Air flight in Indonesia last October.

It was the second fatal crash involving a Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane in five months, following an accident in Indonesia that killed 189 people.

Boeing 737 MAX models have been grounded around the world after the Ethiopia crash, wiping billions of dollars from the market value of the world’s biggest aviation company and raising questions over the certification process by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.