As mentioned last night in the previous blog, news was breaking of an Ethiopian Airlines aircraft crash. Unfortunately none of the 157 people on board the brand new Ethiopian Airlines plane have survived.
The aircraft, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, took off from Addis Ababa-Bole Airport (ADD/HAAB) on runway 07R at 08:38am local time (05:38 GMT) bound for Nairobi-Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (NBO/HKJK), and lost contact with air traffic controllers six minutes later. It crashed near Bishoftu, southeast of the Ethiopian capital, killing all 149 passengers and 8 crew members on board. It is still not immediately clear what caused the crash of the plane, which had been delivered to the airline in November last year. According to Ethiopian Airlines' CEO Tewolde Gebremariam, the pilot, who had been working for the carrier since 2010, sent out a distress call shortly after take-off and was given clearance to return by ATC. Tewolde also said that the "brand-new airplane" had flown 1,200 hours and had arrived from Johannesburg earlier that morning. Ethiopian state media said more than 30 nationalities were on board flight ET 302.
They included 32 Kenyans,
18 Canadians,
9 Ethiopians,
8 each from China, the United States and Italy;
7 each from France and Britain;
6 from Egypt;
4 each from India and Slovakia, among others.
Foreign governments said tourists, business people, doctors, and a Kenyan football official were among the dead.
The last major accident involving an Ethiopian Airlines passenger plane was a Boeing 737-800 that exploded after taking off from Lebanon in 2010, killing 83 passengers and seven crew members.
The Boeing 737-8 MAX is the same type of plane as the Indonesian Lion Air jet that crashed last October, 13 minutes after the take-off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board. https://madaboutplanes.blogspot.com/2018/10/lion-air-737-crashed-shortly-after.html
Boeing said it was "deeply saddened" by the accident and would provide technical assistance to find out why its aircraft crashed. "A Boeing technical team is prepared to provide technical assistance at the request and under the direction of the US National Transportation Safety Board."
An aviation analyst and pilot, said the pilot's distress call signalled that the plane may have gone down due to a "controllability issue" than an explosion.
"That may lead me to believe that the problem wasn't imperatively serious," he told Al Jazeera from New Jersey. "Typically in major disasters when crashes happen, when there are explosions, usually there is no communication from the pilots," he added.
"The pilots are so focused on that catastrophic event, that they don't have time to call air traffic control. The fact that there was a call made to air traffic control, in this instance, makes us believe that it was a controllability issue - that they were struggling for control.
Aircraft Information.
Airline: Ethiopian Airlines
Code: ET/ETH
Aircraft: B737-8 MAX
Registration: ET-AVJ
Serial Number: 62450
Engines: 2 x CFMI LEAP-1B
First Flew: 30/10/2018
Age: 4 Mths
THOUGHTS AND PRAYES GO OUT TO THE IMMEDIATE FAMILES AND FRIENDS AND OF COURSE TO THE STAFF AT ETHIOPIAN AIRLINES
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