Originally Posted by
sansmoteur
Ethiopian officials asked the French aviation accident investigation bureau BEA, which downloaded data from the black boxes, to permanently delete that information from its servers once it had been transmitted to Ethiopian authorities. The BEA has confirmed complying with the request.
This may be formally justified by the fact that, unlike the NTSB, BEA is not an official party to the investigation, but it still strikes me as an odd request. BEA have always respected annex 13 protocol, and even a harsh case like the Yemenia crash, where the Comores investigators pondered the flight recorder data endlessly without making any progress, got no more than an
angry letter by Jean-Paul Troadec.
Officials in Addis Ababa, for their part, are still smarting from the results of an investigation into the deadly 2010 crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane shortly after takeoff from Beirut. That probe, led by Lebanese authorities, found that the airline’s pilots failed to respond adequately to stormy weather during the aircraft’s ascent. Ethiopia at the time disagreed with the findings of the investigation, attributing the crash to bad weather.
That's a cautious phrasing. I remember the "disagreement" to be on the same level of stubborn denial as in the Egypt Air 990 case, but lacking the technical finesse of the Egyptians. Some highlights from the related thread on pprune, back then in 2012:
Originally Posted by
maDJam
Ethiopian Airlines said Tuesday the 2010 crash of its jet off Lebanon was likely caused by sabotage, a lightning strike or was shot down, rejecting an official Lebanese probe blaming pilot error.
Originally Posted by
Sqwak7700
The fact that Ethiopian mentions eye-witness reports of a fireball in the sky is laughable.
Finally, getting back to the current WSJ article posted by sansmoteur:
“With this investigation, we are the ones who are in charge,” the chief of Ethiopia’s civil aviation authority, Col. Wosenyeleh Hunegnaw, said in a March 20 interview.
Oh yes, this is gonna be great.