There were “clear similarities” with October’s Lion Air crash and the Ethiopian Airlines crash, which killed all 157 people on board, Ethiopia said on Sunday. The analysis of the black boxes recovered from the crash site of the March 10 disaster has revealed this information.

The latest version of Boeing’s profitable 737 model’s fate hangs in balance in one of the most high profile air crash investigations in recent years.

Both the planes that crashed within a span of about five months had very new Boeing MAX 8s and both the fatal crashes happened soon after the planes had taken off and after pilots reported issues with flight control. The Boeign 737 Max has been grounded globally by Boeing after dozens of countries and airlines banned and grounded the planes form service over fears about the safety of the plane. The incident has also seen a slide in the share value of Boeing as billions of dollars of its market value were wiped off.

“It was the same case with the Indonesian (Lion Air) one. There were clear similarities between the two crashes so far,” Ethiopian transport ministry spokesman Muse Yiheyis said.

“The data was successfully recovered. Both the American team and our (Ethiopian) team validated it,” he told Reuters. He added that more information in three or four days would be provided by the ministry.

The data had not yet been validated by the FAA and U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), U.S. officials told the media in Washington.

According to a report published in the Seattle Times said on Sunday, there were several crucial flaws in the a new flight control system known as MCAS on MAX jets of Boeing/ the report further added that the flaws includes the power of the system.

The report quoted an FAA spokesman and claimed that the FAA followed a standard certification process on the MAX and had not gone in detailed inquiries.

There were no comments on the report available from the FAA.

Another report in the Wall Street Journal, quoting sources with knowledge of the inquiry, claimed that the FAA’s approval of MAX jets  was being investigated by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The newspaper report further claimed that following the Lion Air accident, an inquiry headed by the department’s inspector general was launched and the investigation now is focused on whether appropriate design standards and engineering analyses were used by the FAA in the certification of the MCAS.

There no comments on the WSJ report from Boeing and the FAA.

A report published by Reuters, quoting two US government officials wihtknowledgeof te matter, claimed that the Transportation Department to investigate a major safety issue was not a surprise. The NTSB and FAA will help in verification and validation of the data when interpretative work on the decoded black box data would be carried out by investigators into the crash in Ethiopia, the Reuters report claimed. The black box is currently being decoded and reviewed in Paris.

(Adapted from BusinessToday.in)