By MARK McDONALD and DERRICK HENRY
Published: January 25, 2010
An Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed into the Mediterranean Sea on Monday morning shortly after it took off in stormy weather from the airport in Beirut, Lebanon.
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The New York Times
Airline officials said 82 passengers and 8 crew members were on board, although the Lebanese military, quoted by the Lebanese National News Agency, said 97 passengers and crew were aboard. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy.
“The flight lost contact with Lebanese air traffic controllers shortly after takeoff,” said Wogayehu Terefe, a spokeswoman for Ethiopian Airlines.
The cause of the crash was not immediately known, although Lebanese President Michel Suleiman ruled out terrorism. “As of now, a sabotage act is unlikely,” he said at a press conference with Defense Minister Elias Murr in the city of Yarze, in east-central Lebanon.
Mr. Suleiman said Lebanese Army helicopters and naval ships were operating with units from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon in a search effort in what he called “extremely difficult weather.”
The military said four bodies were recovered just before dawn.
More than half the people on the flight were Lebanese — 51 people, according to the airline, and 54 according to the military. The airline also said that 23 passengers were Ethiopian. Two British nationals were listed as passengers, and the remaining six passengers were Turkish, French, Russian, Canadian, Syrian and Iraqi citizens, the airline said. The eight crew members were Ethiopian.
The Lebanese news portal Naharnet and news agencies reported that Marla Sanchez Pietton, the wife of the French ambassador to Lebanon, Denis Pietton, had been aboard the plane.
Lebanese officials said that shortly after the plane took off from Beirut-Rafik Hariri International Airport, some residents on the coast saw a plane on fire crashing.
The aircraft went down about 2 miles off the coastal village of Naameh, according to Ghazi Aridi, the public works and transportation minister, who was quoted by Naharnet. The military said the site was 5 miles out.
The plane, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409, was a Boeing 737 that had been scheduled to take off at 2:10 a.m., according to the airline, but it actually left at 2:35. The 1,730-mile flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, was scheduled to take 4 hours and 40 minutes.
Although African airlines in general have a shaky safety record, Ethiopian Airlines has a relatively good history. In a 1996 hijacking, however, one of its planes ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea.
In September 1988, an Ethiopian Airlines 737 crashed shortly after takeoff in Bahar Dar, Ethiopia, after it struck a flock of pigeons. One engine failed immediately and the second lost power when the plane returned to the airport, where it made a crash landing. Of 105 on board, 31 were killed, according to AirSafe.com.
Flight safety records indicate that there has not been a crash involving the Beirut airport since 1987.
The Boeing 737 is one of the most widely used planes in the world, and while it has a fine overall safety record, it has been involved in a few crashes in Europe and Africa in recent years.
There have been questions about the plane’s rudders, notably in a 1994 crash near Pittsburgh in which a plane inexplicably fell out of the sky from about 6,000 feet.
The most recent incident involving a Boeing 737 took place in February 2009, when a Turkish Airlines jet en route from Istanbul crashed about a mile short of the runway in Amsterdam. Nine people, including both pilots were killed, but 123 others survived.
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