Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya. On 10 March 2019, the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft which operated the flight crashed near the town of Bishoftu six minutes after takeoff. All 149 passengers and 8 crew members on board died. It is Ethiopian Airlines' deadliest accident to date, surpassing the fatal hijacking of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 resulting in a crash near the Comoros in 1996 that killed 125. It is also the deadliest aircraft accident to occur in Ethiopia, surpassing the crash of an Ethiopian Air Force Antonov An-26 in 1982, which killed 73 people on board. The crash was caused by a fault in the plane's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), a flight stabilizing system developed by Boeing for the MAX 8. The system had been designed to rely on a single sensor to detect the aircraft's angle of attack. Due to a failure in the sensor, and without a backup sensor to fail over to, the aircraft's nose was repeatedly pitched down against the pilots' inputs, eventually leading the plane to crash. The accident was the second involving a MAX 8, and occurred less than five months after the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 in the Java Sea that killed 189, which was later found to have also been caused by MCAS. The crashes prompted a two-year worldwide grounding of the jet and an investigation into how the aircraft was approved for passenger service.