(Bloomberg) -- The stall-prevention system on the Boeing Co. 737 Max jet automatically switched on before the crash in Ethiopia this month, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing preliminary findings from data on the aircraft’s black boxes.

The conclusion was relayed at a briefing at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday and is the strongest indication yet that the same system malfunctioned in both the Ethiopian Airlines flight and the Lion Air disaster in Indonesia in October, the newspaper said.

A preliminary report from Ethiopian authorities is expected within days, though initial conclusions from the black-box recorders of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 could still change, the people briefed on the matter told the Wall Street Journal.

Boeing was close to a software fix for the 737 Max jet when the Ethiopian Airlines jet went down on March 10. The U.S. planemaker, working with regulators, has spent months refining the software since flight data from the October crash of a Lion Air jet in Indonesia indicated that the system had repeatedly tipped the nose down before pilots lost control.

To contact the reporter on this story: Angus Whitley in Sydney at awhitley1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Young-Sam Cho at ycho2@bloomberg.net, Angus Whitley

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