In a heartfelt public letter, Tewolde GebreMariam, Group CEO of Ethiopian Airlines, again expressed his sadness at the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 and pledged to work with Boeing to make air travel even safer.
He refused to speculate on the causes on the crash since the investigation remains ongoing but he has pledged his “full and transparent cooperation to discover what went wrong”.
GebreMariam stressed the training facilities of the airline, again in response to a newspaper article that criticized the pilot qualifications at the airline. He said that the pilots who fly the Boeing 737 Max 8 “were fully trained on the service bulletin issued by Boeing and the Emergency Airworthiness Directive issued by the USA FAA” after the Lion Air crash in October, adding that among the seven Full Flight Simulators that its owns and operates, two of them are for B-737 NG and the B-737 MAX. “We are the only airline in Africa among the very few in the world with the B-737 MAX full flight Simulator. Contrary to some media reports, our pilots who fly the new model were trained on all appropriate simulators.”
To be clear, GebreMariam categorically states in the letter that “Ethiopian Airlines believes in Boeing”, which has been a partner for many years since two-thirds of the fleet is Boeing aircraft. He also extols the historic links between the airline and US aviation going all the way back to its formation in 1945 with help from Trans World Airlines (TWA).
He finishes that the airline is resolved “to work with Boeing and others to use this tragedy to make the skies safer for the world”.