[2][3] 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.

[2][5][6] The crashes prompted a two-year worldwide long term grounding of the jet and an investigation into how the aircraft was approved for passenger service.

In the case of Flight 302 the route was very popular as a conveyance between African Union headquarters and UN regional offices in Addis Ababa and Nairobi.

It was manufactured by Boeing Commercial Airplanes in 2018 and was delivered to Ethiopian Airlines on 15 November and it had logged 1,330.3 airframe hours in 382 takeoff and landing cycles.

[5] Forty-four seconds after takeoff, as the main gear lifted off the runway, the angle of attack (AoA) sensor on the left side of the aircraft's nose sustained damage, possibly from a bird strike.

This damage caused the sensor to send faulty readings, leading the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) to falsely detect an imminent stall.

In response, MCAS repeatedly commanded the horizontal stabilizer to push the aircraft’s nose downward, even though no stall condition existed.

[14] By the second minute, the MCAS had activated to the point where the horizontal stabilizer was angled sharply downward, pitching the aircraft into a dive.

[13] Three minutes into the flight, with the aircraft continuing to lose altitude and accelerating beyond its safety limits, the captain instructed the first officer to request permission from air traffic control to return to the airport.

[5] It crashed in the woreda (district) of Gimbichu, Oromia Region,[20] in a farm field near the town of Bishoftu, 62 kilometres (39 mi; 33 nmi) southeast of Bole International Airport.

Nearly a hundred disaster victim identification (DVI) experts from 14 countries supported the Interpol Incident Response Team (IRT) mission.

An employee of the Norwegian Red Cross, a British intern with the Norwegian Refugee Council, an environmental agent for the Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators, four Catholic Relief Services staff, and a senior Ugandan police official on assignment with the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia were also killed.

[45][46] Notable victims on-board included the Italian archaeologist and Councillor for Cultural Heritage of Sicily, Sebastiano Tusa,[47] and Nigerian-Canadian academic Pius Adesanmi.

[2] Other notable victims included Christine Alalo, a Ugandan police commissioner and peacekeeper serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia.

[5] Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam visited the accident site, confirmed that there were no survivors and expressed sympathy and condolences.

[53] During the opening of the fourth United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi, a minute of silence was observed in sympathy for the victims.

It stated that Boeing "plans to update training requirements and flight crew manuals in response to the design change" to the aircraft's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).

Inspector General asking him to "proceed with an audit to compile an objective and detailed factual history of the activities that resulted in the certification of the Boeing 737-MAX 8 aircraft.

[62] In response to increasing domestic and international pressure to take action,[63][64][65] the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded the aircraft on March 13, 2019, reversing a Continued Airworthiness Notice issued two days prior.

[67] By March 18, every single Boeing 737 MAX plane (387 in total) had been grounded, which affected 8,600 weekly flights operated by 59 airlines across the globe.

Investigators discovered the jackscrew that controlled the pitch angle of the horizontal stabilizer of Flight 302, was in the full "nose down" position.

[74] Due to this finding, some experts in Indonesia suggested that the Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) should cooperate with Flight 302's investigation team.

[80] The NTSB's comments read in part:[16] Overall, the US team concurs with the EAIB's investigation of the MCAS and related systems and the roles that they played in the accident.

However, the BEA considers that some aspects of the analysis of the crew performance in the first phases of the flight are insufficiently developed and could improve the understanding of what could have been done by the crew which could have modified the outcome of the flight.The report continues in documenting the pilots' errors:[81] During the accident flight, the flight crew did not make appropriate use of the associated applicable procedures on which he [sic] had received training in the preceding months.The Captain's attempts to engage AP was in contradiction with the Approach to Stall or Stall Recovery maneuver check list, which was expected to be applied in reaction to the stick shaker activation.Degradation of the CRM which started immediately after the AOA vane failure and which didn't help the crew take the necessary actions to keep the plane under control although they had received an adequate recurrent training on situations that occurred in the accident flight.

[82][83] According to Ethiopian transport minister Dagmawit Moges, the crew "performed all the procedures repeatedly provided by the manufacturer but was not able to control the aircraft".

[84][85][86] Bjorn Fehrm from Leeham News stated the preliminary report confirms "the Flight Crew followed the procedures prescribed by FAA and Boeing in Airworthiness Directive 2018-23-51",[78] released shortly after the Lion Air crash.

[90][91][92][93] On 25 April, The Aviation Herald submitted 25 questions that have arisen in the aftermath of the accident to the FAA's Flight Standardization Board (FSB) regarding their draft for certification of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft.

[1] Based on the preliminary report, The Aviation Herald comes to the conclusion: "Neither of the three crews" (JT-43, JT-610, ET-302) "would have been forced to react under time pressure in order to prevent a crash, [...] without the technical malfunctions [of the angle of attack sensors] and the nose down trim inputs.

"[1] According to The Air Current aviation journal and The Seattle Times, the preliminary report shows that while the pilots initially followed the correct procedure to disable runaway trim, they did not complete the checklist fully, and consequently, the recovery effort did not succeed.

[78][99] According to Bjorn Fehrm (Leeham News) and Peter Lemme at this time the airplane was flying "at 375kts and MCAS was never designed to trim at these Speed/Altitude combinations".