New York, In the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, all Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft will remain grounded at least until May, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has said.
According to the US regulator on Thursday, the aircraft will not fly until a software update can be tested and installed. Sunday’s crash took place shortly after take-off from Addis Ababa, killing 157 people from 35 nations.
It was the second crash involving a 737 Max in six months as a similar disaster took place in October 2018 in Indonesia by Lion Air jet that killed 189 people.
US Representative Rick Larsen said the software upgrade would take a few weeks to complete, and installing it on all the aircraft would take “at least through April”, as reported by BBC. The FAA said on Wednesday that a software fix for the 737 Max that Boeing had been working on since the Lion Air crash would take months to complete.
Meanwhile, investigators in France have taken charge of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines aircraft’s black boxes as they attempt to uncover what caused the Boeing 737 Max disaster.
The Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) received the flight data and cockpit voice recorders on Thursday. The first readings could take days, but a lot depends on the boxes’ condition.
A BEA spokesman said he did not know what condition the black boxes were in. “First we will try to read the data,” the spokesman said, adding that the first analyses could take between half a day and several days.
Regulators across the world continue to ground the Boeing aircraft.