Ethiopian restarts 737 Max flights three years after fatal crash

Ethiopian Airlines Group carried out its first official flight with Boeing Co.’s 737 Max since a deadly crash in March 2019 that triggered a global grounding of the jet. 

The three-year-old plane took off from the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa at 9:18 a.m. GMT on Tuesday and was in the air for about four hours before returning, tracking site FlightAware showed.

The state-owned carrier’s Chief Executive Officer Tewolde GebreMariam has said he’s confident in the plane after its U.S. re-certification, even though Ethiopian authorities are yet to release a final report on findings from their crash investigations. Ethiopian’s chairman, top executives and government officials were on board the demonstration flight, which also included journalists. 

“Our pilots and engineers are fully satisfied,” Tewolde said in an interview last month. 

The Ethiopian Airlines’s crash happened about five months after Lion Air’s 737 Max plunged off the coast of Indonesia, with a worldwide grounding happening soon after. 346 people were killed in the two incidents. Lion Air completed its first test flight of the plane on Jan. 21. 

A total of 185 global regulators, including those from China and the U.S., have cleared the Max to fly, a critical step to Boeing’s plans to speed production of its cash-cow jet this year.