An Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed into the Mediterranean Sea on Monday morning shortly after it took off from Beirut International Airport. News reports said that 85 people were on board. A woman who answered the phone at the Lebanese Civil Aviation Authority said that the plane, which was headed for Addis Ababa, crashed after it took off at about 2:30 a.m. “Yes, the plane crashed into the sea off Lebanon,” said the woman, who declined to give her name. A Lebanese aviation official told The Associated Press that the plane disappeared off the radar 45 minutes after takeoff from Beirut. Ethiopian Airlines flight 409 – a Boeing 737 – was scheduled to take off at 2:10 a.m., according to the company’s Web site. The airline did not immediately respond to calls and e-mail messages. Although African airlines in general have a shaky safety record, Ethiopian Airlines has a relatively good history. But one of its planes was involved in a 1996 hijacking in which the it ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea. A spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines would not comment on the fate of the plane. Reuters reported that residents on the coast saw a plane on fire crashing. Flight safety records indicate that there has not been a crash involving Beirut International Airport since 1987. While Flight 409 had been scheduled to leave the airport at 2:10 a.m. Beirut time, it actually left at 2:30 a.m. The 1,730-mile flight to Addis Ababa was scheduled to take 4 hours and 40 minutes. 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 crash near Pittsburgh in which a plane inexplicably fell out of the sky at about 8,000 feet.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/world/middleeast/25crash.html
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