Everyone on board the ill-fated Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed earlier today, have been confirmed dead by the airline.
It said 149 passengers and eight crew members were believed to be on flight ET302 from the Ethiopian capital to Nairobi in Kenya.
There were no immediate details on what caused the crash of the Boeing 737-8 MAX plane, which was new and had been delivered to the airline in November.
Ethiopia’s state broadcaster EBC said all passengers were dead, adding that they included 33 nationalities.
The crash happened at 08.44 local time, six minutes after the months-old Boeing 737 Max-8 took off.
It is not yet clear what caused the accident.
Records show that the plane was new. The Planespotters civil aviation database shows that the Boeing 737-8 MAX was delivered to Ethiopian Airlines in mid-November.
Boeing, the company that built the aeroplane, said in a tweet that it was “closely monitoring the situation”.
Another plane of the same model was involved in a crash five months ago, when a Lion Air flight crashed into the sea near Indonesia with nearly 190 people on board.
The last deadly crash of an Ethiopian Airlines passenger plane was in 2010, when a plane crashed minutes after takeoff from Beirut, killing all 90 people on board.
