Ethiopian Passenger Plane Crashes with 157 Aboard
A passenger aircraft traveling from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to Kenya crashed shortly after takeoff from the airport runway and went down 50 kilometers from Addis Ababa.
A Boeing 737 operated by Ethiopian Airlines that departed Addis Ababa for Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, on Sunday morning, March 10, crashed shortly after takeoff from the airport.
The aircraft carried 149 passengers and 8 crew members. Abiy Ahmed, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, confirmed the news in a tweet and offered condolences to those affected by the disaster.
According to a report by the German news agency from Ethiopia, the aircraft went down 50 kilometers south of Addis Ababa.
Ethiopian Airlines announced in a statement that contact with the Boeing passenger aircraft was lost shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa airport. According to the company, the Boeing 737 left the airport runway at 8:38 a.m. local time and contact with the airport control tower was lost six minutes later.
It appears that all passengers and crew aboard the Boeing perished in the crash. International news agencies reported in their latest reports at least 150 fatalities.
The aircraft’s passengers were of 33 different nationalities. 32 of them were Kenyan citizens and 17 were Ethiopian. No report has been released regarding the cause of the Boeing 737 crash.
According to the German news agency, Ethiopian Airlines is considered a reliable airline and operates numerous flights to various destinations around the world, including Frankfurt, Munich, and London.
However, this is not the first aviation disaster for the airline. In January 2010, another Boeing 737 operated by the airline with 90 passengers on board crashed off the coast of Lebanon in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1996, a passenger aircraft operated by the airline with 175 passengers on board was hijacked. The hijackers wanted to divert the aircraft to Australia, but due to fuel depletion, the pilot decided to land it on the sea near Cameroon. In this emergency landing, only 50 of the passengers survived.
Source: DW
