An airplane from Ethiopian Airlines with 157 people on board crashed today. It is a Boeing 737 that was traveling from Ethiopia to Nairobi in Kenya. There are no survivors.
The Prime Minister of Ethiopia condoned in a statement the relatives without giving details of the accident. A spokesperson for the airline confirms that a plane crashed around 8.44 am (local time).
The aircraft ran into problems after taking off from the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. The plane ‘had an unstable vertical speed’, reports Flightradar24. The contact with the flight was also broken six minutes after takeoff.
The crash took place at the height of the city Debre Zeit, about fifty kilometers southeast of the capital. There were 149 passengers and eight crew members on board. The victims have 33 different nationalities. Among the dead are, among others, 32 Kenyans, 17 Ethiopians and 8 Chinese. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is looking for whether Dutch people were on board.
Many passengers were waiting for information at Nairobi airport. ,, We are waiting for my mother. She does not answer her phone, “said Wendy Otieno to Reuters news agency, holding her phone and crying Robert Mudanta (46) waits for his brother-in-law from Canada” Nobody told us anything, we just stood here And hope for the best. ”
Khalid Ali Abdulrahman was lucky. When he picked up his son at the airport, he heard on the spot that the plane had crashed. ,, I was in shock, but shortly after, my son called me to tell me that he was still in Addis and that he was not on board this flight, “he says relieved.
The crashed plane is only a few months old and made its first flight at the end of last year. Addis Ababa airport has recently been renovated.
Ethiopian Airlines is owned by the state and has experienced very strong growth in recent years. The fleet has more than a hundred planes, making it the largest on the African continent.
In 2010, an international scheduled flight of this company also crashed. That plane was also on its way to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. It collapsed a few minutes after departure from Rafik Hariri International Airport in Beirut (Lebanon) in the Mediterranean at about 3.5 kilometers from the coast. The aircraft had just taken off in heavy weather with a thunderstorm. Ninety people were killed.
The plane that crashed now is the same type as a plane from the Indonesian airline Lion Air that crashed into the sea last year, 13 minutes after taking off from Jakarta. 189 people died.