'No survivors' from crashed Ethiopian Airlines flight - state broadcaster
Workers service an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737-800 plane at the Bole International Airport.
NAIROBI (Reuters) - There were no survivors from an Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed with 149 passengers and eight crew members aboard, the state broadcaster said on Sunday.
“There are no survivors onboard the flight, which carried passengers from 33 countries,” said state-run Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation, quoting an unidentified source at the airline.
An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 passenger jet to Nairobi crashed early on Sunday, the airline said.
Flight ET 302 crashed near the town of Bishoftu, 62 kilometres southeast of the capital Addis Ababa, the airline said, confirming the plane was a Boeing 737-800 MAX, registration number ET-AVJ.
The flight left Bole airport in Addis Ababa at 8.38 am local time, before losing contact with the control tower just a few minutes later at 8.44 am.
“Search and rescue operations are in progress and we have no confirmed information about survivors or any possible casualties,” the airline said in a statement.
State-owned Ethiopian is one of the biggest carriers on the continent by fleet size. It said previously that it expected to carry 10.6 million passengers last year.
Its last major crash was in January 2010, when a flight from Beirut went down shortly after take-off.
The Ethiopian prime minister’s official Twitter account on Sunday expressed condolences to families of those lost in an Ethiopian airline’s flight to Nairobi, without giving details.
“The office of the PM, on behalf of government and people of Ethiopia, would like to express it’s deepest condolences to the families that have lost their loved ones on Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 on regular scheduled flight to Nairobi, Kenya this morning,” the PM’s office said on Twitter.
Ethiopia flight had unstable vertical speed - flight tracking site
“Data from Flightradar24 ADS-B network show that vertical speed was unstable after take off,” the Swedish-based flight tracking organisation said on its Twitter feed.
