BEIRUT (Reuters) – A US navy vessel located on Wednesday the flight recorders from an Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed off the coast of Lebanon two days ago with 90 people aboard, a security official said.
‘The US ship located the black boxes 1,300 metres underwater and 8 km west of Beirut airport,’ the security official told Reuters, adding that search teams now had to assess the best way to retrieve the recorders.
Flight ET409, a Boeing 737-800, was carrying mostly Lebanese and Ethiopian passengers and was heading to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. The plane apparently broke up in the air before plunging in a ball of fire into the Mediterranean during a thunderstorm early on Monday.
The security official said it was still too early to say whether the USS Ramage, brought in to help with the search, had also located the plane’s fuselage. ‘Theoretically the black boxes should be inside the plane’s fuselage, but this is all speculation at the moment,’ he said, Lebanese and international teams, including European and UN peacekeeping ships, helicopters, planes and divers have been scouring a search area 10 km out to sea and 20 km long for the plane’s fuselage and more of its victims.
The search has been hampered by rough seas and because of the uneven depth of the sea bed.
The flight recorders should shed light on why the pilot did not respond to a request to change direction even though he acknowledged the control tower’s commands. Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi said the plane made a sharp turn before disappearing off the radar. He said it was too early to draw any conclusion of pilot error
AFP Report: “To blame pilot is mere speculation: Minister”
An international search operation since Monday had combed a 35-square-kilometre area around the crash site just south of Beirut.
It was the Ethiopian national carrier’s deadliest disaster in almost 65 years of existence.
Officials have cautioned against blaming the pilot without sufficient evidence and pinned their hopes on the black boxes to answer the question of what had happened on flight ET 409.
Lebanese Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi has said the pilot, who had 20 years of experience and was familiar with the Boeing 737-800, rogered instructions from the Beirut airport control tower to avoid the storm.
But the plane took a turn the other way and flew into the weather, he said.
“To say there was pilot error is pure speculation,” Aridi told AFP earlier, echoing similar comments by the defence ministry.
Ethiopian Airlines spokesperson Wogayehu Tefere said the pilot was senior, “with a lot of experience” and had been “working for the company for 20 years”.
“He had been a co-pilot on this aircraft before and he flew this route on a regular basis as well as other routes.”
There were conflicting reports as to whether the jet exploded while still airbound or after it had hit the water, and officials have said there will be no answers until the black boxes are accessed.
Experts have also been saying that extreme turbulence or wind shear may have caused the pilot to lose control of the plane.
The search operation has been joined by Lebanese navy troops, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) as well as US navy destroyer the USS Ramage and a civilian boat from Cyprus with sonar equipment.
Six Ethiopians and six Lebanese have been identified among the 14 bodies at the state hospital, including those of two toddlers who were on board the ill-fated flight, Lebanese Health Minister Mohammed Jawad Khalifeh said on Wednesday.
Khalifeh said authorities in Addis Ababa were sending DNA samples from families of the Ethiopian passengers to assist in identifying the victims.
