Ethiopian Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges confirmed that the plane crash of Ethiopian Airlines' Boeing 737 Max bound for Nairobi, which occurred minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019, was caused by an error of the on-board software.
The Kenyan website The Nation reported it today.
The disaster caused 157 deaths, including eight Italians, and triggered the most serious crisis in the history of the Boeing company.
"The aircraft's left angle-of-attack sensor failed shortly after takeoff, sending erroneous data to the flight control system, and the erroneous data entered triggered the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which repeatedly pitched the nose of the aircraft to the point where the pilot lost control," Moges told reporters yesterday.
The final report will be published in the next few days, the minister said.
The Ethiopian investigators had already highlighted in a preliminary report in March 2020 that the causes were to be attributed to the flight software, as the design of the MCAS system "made it vulnerable to unwanted activation".
In the crash, among others, the founder of the International Committee for the Development of Peoples (CISP) Paolo Dieci and the archaeologist Sebastiano Tusa lost their lives.