Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya. On 10 March 2019, the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft which operated the flight crashed near the town of Bishoftu six minutes after takeoff. All 149 passengers and 8 crew members on board died.
It is Ethiopian Airlines' deadliest accident to date, surpassing the fatal hijacking of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 resulting in a crash near the Comoros in 1996 that killed 125. It is also the deadliest aircraft accident to occur in Ethiopia, surpassing the crash of an Ethiopian Air Force Antonov An-26 in 1982, which killed 73 people on board.
The crash was caused by a fault in the plane's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), a flight stabilizing system developed by Boeing for the MAX 8. The system had been designed to rely on a single sensor to detect the aircraft's angle of attack. Due to a failure in the sensor, the aircraft's nose was repeatedly pitched down against the pilots' inputs, eventually leading the plane to crash.
The accident was the second involving a MAX 8, and occurred less than five months after the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 in the Java Sea that killed 189, which was later found to have also been caused by MCAS. The crashes prompted a two-year worldwide grounding of the jet and an investigation into how the aircraft was approved for passenger service.
The aircraft was a brand-new Boeing 737 MAX 8, with serial number 62450 and registered as ET-AVJ. It was manufactured by Boeing Commercial Airplanes in 2018 and was delivered to Ethiopian Airlines on 15 November. It had logged 1,330.3 airframe hours in 382 takeoff and landing cycles. It was also powered by two CFM International LEAP-1B28B1G05 engines.
In command was 29-year-old Captain Yared Getachew who had been flying with the airline for almost nine years and had logged a total of 8,122 flight hours, including 4,120 hours on the Boeing 737. He had been a Boeing 737-800 captain since November 2017; he started flying the Boeing 737 MAX in July 2018. At the time of the accident, he was the youngest captain at the airline. His co-pilot was 25-year-old First Officer Ahmednur Mohammed who was a recent graduate from the airline's academy with 361 flight hours logged, including 207 hours on the Boeing 737.
Flight 302 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Nairobi, Kenya. The flight departed Addis Ababa at 08:38:34 local time (05:38:34 UTC) with 149 passengers and 8 crew on board.
Seconds after takeoff at 08:38:44, the left and right angle of attack (AOA) sensors immediately started disagreeing on each other's data. Due to the AOAs' erroneous and unstable data, the left stick shaker immediately activated. The airspeed indicators on both sides also disagreed with each other and the master caution and the anti-ice lights illuminated.
Approximately one minute into the flight, the first officer, following the captain's instructions, retracted the flaps. Within 10 seconds of this action, the autopilot disengaged, and the aircraft started to descend. The captain directed the first officer to report a "flight control" problem to the control tower.
By the second minute, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) had angled the horizontal stabilizer sharply downward, pitching the aircraft into a dive. Although the pilots managed to briefly counteract the nose-down attitude, the aircraft continued to lose altitude.
The first officer, correctly identifying that they were experiencing a runaway MCAS activation, called out "Stab trim cut-out!" The pilots toggled switches to disable the aircraft's electrical trim tab system, which also deactivated the MCAS software. Unlike previous 737 models, both switches disabled all electrical control of the stabilizer. Without the electric trim system, the other possible way to move the stabilizer is by cranking the trim wheel by hand, but because the stabilizer was located opposite to the elevator, strong aerodynamic forces were acting on it due to the pilots' inadequate thrust management. At the plane's high speed, there was further pressure on the stabilizer. The pilots' attempts to manually crank the stabilizer back into position failed.
Three minutes into the flight, with the aircraft continuing to lose altitude and accelerating beyond its safety limits, the captain instructed the first officer to request permission from air traffic control to return to the airport. Permission was granted, and the air traffic controllers diverted other approaching flights. Following instructions from air traffic control, they turned the aircraft to the east, and it rolled to the right. The right wing came to point down as the turn steepened.
About five minutes into the flight, having struggled to keep the plane's nose from diving further by manually pulling the yoke, the captain turned the electrical trim tab system back on in the hope that it would allow him to put the stabilizer back into neutral trim. However, in turning the trim system back on, he also reactivated the MCAS software, which reactivated nine seconds later and pushed the nose further down. The captain and first officer attempted to raise the nose by manually pulling their yokes, but the aircraft continued to plunge toward the ground, crashing 25 seconds after MCAS was reactivated and 34 seconds after the captain flipped the stab trim switches.
The aircraft disappeared from radar screens and crashed at 08:43:45, about six minutes after takeoff. Flight tracking data showed that the aircraft's altitude and rate of climb and descent were fluctuating. Several witnesses stated the plane trailed "white smoke" and made strange noises before crashing. The aircraft impacted the ground at nearly 700 miles per hour (610 kn; 1,100 km/h). There were no survivors.
It crashed in the district of Gimbichu, Oromia Region, in a farm field near the town of Bishoftu, 62 kilometres (39 mi; 33 nmi) southeast of Bole International Airport. The impact created a crater about 28 metres (92 ft) wide and 40 metres (130 ft) long, and wreckage was driven up to 10 metres (33 ft) deep into the soil. Wreckage was strewn around the field along with personal effects and body parts.
Shortly after the crash, police and a firefighting crew from a nearby Ethiopian Air Force base arrived and extinguished the flames at the crash site. Police cordoned off the site, and Ethiopian Red Cross personnel and air crash investigators moved in. Together with local villagers, they sifted through the wreckage, recovering pieces of the aircraft, personal effects, and human remains. Trucks and excavators were brought in to assist in clearing the crash site. Human remains found were bagged and taken to Bole International Airport for storage in refrigeration units typically used to store roses destined for export, before being taken to St. Paul's Hospital in Addis Ababa for storage pending identification. Personnel from Interpol and Blake Emergency Services, a private British disaster response firm contracted by the Ethiopian government, arrived to gather human tissue for DNA testing, and an Israel Police forensics team also arrived to assist in identifying the remains of the two Israeli victims of the crash. The Chinese railway construction firm CRSG, later joined by another construction firm, CCCC, brought in large scale equipment including excavators and trucks. They recovered both flight recorders on 11 March, with the first being found at 9 am and the second flight recorder found at 1 pm. The black boxes were given to Ethiopian Airlines and were sent to Paris for inspection by the BEA, the French aviation accident investigation agency.
The airline stated that there were 35 different nationalities among the 157 occupants on board. Crash victim positive identification was announced on 13 September 2019. Nearly a hundred disaster victim identification (DVI) experts from 14 countries supported the Interpol Incident Response Team (IRT) mission.