NAIROBI: All 149 passengers and eight crew members onboard a new Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 passenger jet to Nairobi which crashed early on Sunday are confirmed dead, the state broadcaster announced.
The flight left Bole airport in Addis Ababa at 8.38am local time, before losing contact with the control tower just a few minutes later at 8.44am.
“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.
Chinese state TV has confirmed that eight of its country’s nationals were onboard the plane.
Flight ET 302 crashed near the town of Bishoftu, 62 kilometres southeast of the capital Addis Ababa, the airline said.
Multiple aviation websites have identified the plane as a new 737 MAX 8, the same plane that crashed in Indonesia in October, killing 189.
“Search and rescue operations are in progress…,” the airline said in a statement.
The flight had unstable vertical speed after take-off, said flight tracking website Flightradar24 on its Twitter feed.
At Nairobi airport, many relatives of passengers were waiting at the gate, with no information from airport authorities.
“We’re just waiting for my mum. We’re just hoping she took a different flight or was delayed. She’s not picking up her phone,” said Wendy Otieno, clutching her phone and weeping.
Robert Mutanda, 46, was waiting for his brother-in-law coming from Canada.
“No, we haven’t seen anyone from the airline or the airport,” he told Reuters at 1pm, more than three hours after the flight was lost. “Nobody has told us anything, we are just standing here hoping for the best.”
The Ethiopian prime minister’s office sent condolences via Twitter to the families of those lost in the crash.
On Oct 29, a Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashed into the Java Sea shortly after take-off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board.
The plane is the latest version of the 737 family, the world’s best-selling modern passenger aircraft and one of the industry’s most reliable.
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 Jan 2010, when a flight from Beirut went down shortly after take-off.