JOHANNESBURG – Ethiopian Airlines has denied tampering with maintenance records in the wake of the fatal March crash of one of its Boeing 737 Max jet aeroplanes which killed all 157 passengers on board.
“The accident, in which the plane nose-dived into a field outside Addis Ababa, led to the six-month grounding of the aircraft model as numerous reports faulted an automated control system which pushed the nose of the jet sharply downward,” the East African reported.
But the allegations of whistle-blower Yonas Yeshanew, Ethiopian Airline's former chief engineer, who is seeking asylum in the United States has reopened a festering wound.
Yeshanew asserts that someone from the airline had entered the maintenance record system after the crash although he said he was uncertain if anything was altered, before adding that the airlines has a history of falsifying records and signing off on dodgy maintenance and repair jobs.
Ethiopian Airlines said in a statement emailed to AFP that directly after the crash "all relevant hard copy maintenance records of the aircraft involved in the accident" were sealed, stored in a secure place and delivered to investigators.
"All maintenance activities [are] done and pilot remarks reported on the aircraft before the accident are recorded on hard copy documents. Hard copies are the official records of aircraft. The allegation that pilot and technicians' notes were changed is completely false," the airline said.