An Ethiopian Airlines flight on its way to Nairobi from Addis Ababa crashed this morning, leaving no survivors in its wake. As Al Jazeera pointed out, the Boeing 737 MAX 8 carrying 149 passengers and eight Ethiopian Airlines servicemen and women, lost contact with air traffic control 6 minutes after take-off, crashing near the city of Bishoftu in the southeast portion of the country.
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The pilot manning the Boeing 737 issued a distress call just seconds before air traffic controllers lost signal. It's not yet known what caused the plane to become unstable while in the lower reaches of the atmosphere.
"At this stage, we cannot rule out anything," Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam said. "We cannot also attribute the cause to anything because we will have to comply with the international regulation to wait for the investigation."
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Ethiopian Airlines published the above image showing debris from the wreckage. In the picture, the airline's CEO can be seen holding up a chunk of the aircraft, thus implicating himself in the ensuing investigative efforts, to be conducted by EA and other bodies as well as the other regulatory bodies concerned with accidents of this nature.
A press release issued by the Ethiopian state media claims that over 30 nationalities were represented aboard the flight: 32 Kenyans, 18 Canadians, 9 Ethiopians, 8 from China, the United States and Italy respectively; 7 from France, 7 from Great Britain, 6 from Egypt, and 4 from both India and Slovakia, among others who suffered the same fate in smaller numbers.
