Addis Ababa (AFP)
The airline Ethiopian Airlines on Wednesday denied allegations of a whistleblower that she falsified the maintenance record of his Boeing 737 MAX which crashed in March, causing the death of its 157 occupants.
Since the accident, the Boeing 737 MAXs have been grounded around the world, with numerous reports of a failure in the aircraft's anti-stall system that caused it to stumble.
The same system had been implicated in the crash of a Boeing 737 MAX of the Indonesian airline Lion Air in October 2018, which had killed 189 people.
Former Ethiopian Airlines chief engineer Yonas Yeshanew - who has applied for asylum in the United States - spoke of questionable maintenance practices as well as numerous cases of corruption within the airline, in an article by the US news agency AP released Tuesday.
According to the engineer, someone accessed the maintenance register just after the March 10 crash. He says he does not know if this person has tampered with this register in this particular case, but has ensured that the practice is common within Ethiopian Airlines, including to camouflage maintenance and repairs of poor quality.
In a reaction sent to AFP, Ethiopian Airlines ensures that, immediately after the crash, "all relevant records of the maintenance record of the aircraft involved in the accident" were sealed, stored safely and handed over to the investigators.
"All the maintenance activities carried out and the comments of the pilots about the plane before the accident are recorded on paper documents," added the same source. "The paper documents are the official register of the device".
"The allegation that the ratings of the pilots and technicians have been changed is completely false," said Ethiopian Airlines, who described his former chief engineer as a "disgruntled employee."
He claims to have fled the country after being briefly arrested and interrogated for expressing his concerns to journalists.
© 2019 AFP