The US aviation regulator has issued a lengthy defence of its safety procedures as criticism mounts over the way in which it certified Boeing’s 737 Max aircraft, the model that has crashed twice in the last six months.
The Federal Aviation Authority made its intervention even as the Ethiopian government said there were similarities between the crash this month near Addis Ababa and one off Indonesia in October.
The FAA insisted pilots should have been trained for the kind of scenario that apparently led to the Lion Air crash in October, although it admitted it did not refer specifically in its training guidelines to the new anti-stall system — known as MCAS — which may have malfunctioned.