Source: AL JAZEERA & News Agencies
None of the 157 people on board a new Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed on Sunday morning en route to Nairobi from Addis Ababa have survived, the airline said.
The aircraft, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, took off at 08:38am (05:38 GMT) and lost contact with air traffic controllers six minutes later.
It crashed near Bishoftu, southeast of the Ethiopian capital, killing all 149 passengers and eight crew members on board, Ethiopian Airlines said in a statement.
It was not immediately clear what caused the crash of the plane, which had been delivered to the airline in November.
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.
Tewolde, who visited the scene of the crash, also said that the “brand-new airplane” had flown 1,200 hours and had arrived from Johannesburg on Sunday morning.
Ethiopian state media said more than 30 nationalities were on board flight ET 302.
They included 32 Kenyans, 18 Canadians, nine Ethiopians, eight each from China, the United States and Italy; seven each from France and Britain; six from Egypt; four each from India and Slovakia, among others.
Foreign governments said tourists, business people, doctors, and a Kenyan football official were among the dead.
Also on board was at least one staff member of the UN Environment Programme meeting in Nairobi from Monday for an annual assembly of 4,700 heads of state, ministers, business leaders, senior UN officials and civil society representatives. The head of the World Food Programme also wrote on Twitter that agency staff were among those on board.
Ethiopian Airlines said it set up a committee with all stakeholders concerned to conduct forensic investigations and identify the victims.
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.
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.
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