Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed six minutes after take-off from Bole International Airport enroute from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya. All 157 passengers and crew were killed.

This was the second major air disaster involving a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane in less than 6 months. A Boeing 737 MAX 8 operated by Lion Air crashed on 29 October 2018 shortly after take-off from Soekarno–Hatta International Airport in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Similarities to the earlier Lion Air crash led airlines to groundi their Boeing 737 MAX fleets and countries closing their air space to the beleaguered aircraft model following the Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 incident.

Suspicions abound concerning problems with the Boeing flight control system called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). The company was revealed to be working on a software update tot he system even before the Ethiopian Airlines crash.