US aerospace giant Boeing said Thursday it was suspending deliveries of its top-selling 737 MAX as French investigators took delivery of the black boxes from the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 passengers and crew.
The MAX has been grounded worldwide following the disaster — the second involving the model in five months — and the fallout has left the company, regulators and airlines scrambling to respond.
“We are pausing the delivery of the 737 MAX until we come up with a solution,” a Boeing spokesman said, adding that “we are going to continue the production, but we are assessing our capacities.”
France’s BEA air safety agency confirmed it has received the black box recorders from the plane, which was just four months old and crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on Sunday.
Starting Friday, BEA investigators will try to retrieve information from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, which were damaged in the disaster.
Thousands of miles (kilometers) away, distraught families were demanding answers as they visited the deep black crater where the plane smashed into a field outside the capital, disintegrating on impact.
Ethiopian Airlines, Africa’s largest carrier, sent the black boxes to France because it does not have the equipment to analyse the data.
The information that they contain helps explain 90 percent of all crashes, according to aviation experts.
On Wednesday, US authorities said new evidence showed similarities between the Ethiopia crash and that of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia in October that killed 189 people.