Ethiopian Airlines flight carrying 157 people to Nairobi crashes, no survivors

Mar 10 (AZINS) An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 passenger jet to Nairobi crashed early on Sunday with 149 passengers and eight crew members aboard, the airline said, and there were no survivors, according to the state broadcaster.

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.

“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.

China state TV said there were eight Chinese citizens on the flight.

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.

"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.

According to Swedish flight-tracking website flightradar24, the passenger jet "had unstable vertical speed" before it crashed.

"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.

The prime minister's office sent condolences via Twitter to the families of those lost in the crash, without offering further details.

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.