Black boxes show ‘clear similarities’ between Ethiopia, Lion Air crashes

ADDIS ABABA: Black box data indicate "clear similarities" between last week's crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jet and the October crash of an Indonesian Lion Air plane, Ethiopia's transport minister said on Sunday.

"Clear similarities were noted between Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610, which would be the subject of further study during the investigation," Dagmawit Moges told journalists, adding a preliminary report into last Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people will be released in "30 days".

Funerals for Ethiopia crash victims but little to bury: Ethiopians were holding funerals Sunday for friends and relatives who perished in last week's Ethiopian Airlines crash, which killed all onboard and saw the worldwide grounding of the Boeing aircraft involved.

Families in 35 nations were left bereaved when the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft plummeted from the sky just minutes into its flight to Nairobi last Sunday, killing all 157 passengers and crew on board.

One week after the crash, relatives of the 17 Ethiopian victims gathered with hundreds of others at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa, sobbing and holding portraits of their loved ones as an Ethiopian Orthodox priest said the last rites.

"What I can't forget is that she left an eight-month-old child and didn't come back," said Meselech Petros, whose sister Amma Tesfamariam was a flight attendant on the doomed aircraft. Her 28-year-old sister wasn't supposed to work that day, but had gone in to cover for a colleague.

Caskets draped in the Ethiopian flag were brought to the cathedral in a convoy of black hearses accompanied by hundreds of mourners. But it was not clear what the coffins contained. Witnesses said the plane nose-dived into a field southeast of the capital, with the force of the impact leaving few bodies intact.

On Thursday, as grieving families and friends visited the area where the plane went down, an AFP correspondent saw them being handed plastic water bottles filled with earth from the site. Ethiopia's government has said it may take up to six months to identify the remains.