Girma Wake, the CEO of Ethiopian Airlines, said the plane had continued its international flight the same day.
“Though emergency landing was a necessity, the incident was blown out of proportion by the media,” the boss of arguably Africa’s best airline told the Voice of America.
“The jet that landed in the Chadian capital, Ndjamena, was a Boeing 757 but it was reported as Boeing 737 (so as to relate it to the doomed Flight ET409),” he said.
Flight ET409 was the passenger aircraft that crashed into the sea off Beirut on Monday, with all eighty-two passengers and eight crew members presumed dead. Search and rescue teams still scour the sea to salvage the wreckage for investigation.
A US navy vessel –USS Ramage – has located the black boxes in the deep sea but has not yet brought up the devices that hold the key to the facts surrounding the crash of the airplane.
Another 737 airliner makes emergency landing
N’DJAMENA, Jan 29 (AFP) – AN ETHIOPIAN Airlines passenger jet en route from Dakar in Senegal to Addis Ababa made an emergency landing on Thursday in Chad due to a radar problem, airport authorities said.
The incident comes days after another Ethiopian Airlines 737 with 90 people on board crashed into the Mediterranean minutes after takeoff from Beirut during a raging thunderstorm on Monday.
The Boeing 737, carrying 150 passengers, ‘circled around N’Djamena for one hour before making an emergency call. There was a radar problem, so it landed,’ an airport official said.
An airport source said the plane, which had made a stopover in Bamako, Mali, dumped its fuel before landing.
The same plane had already experienced electrical troubles when leaving Dakar earlier on Thursday , and had had to return, passengers said.
BEIRUT (Jan 29) – Search crews have used sonar technology to scan the sea floor for a crashed Ethiopian Airlines jet after a US Navy vessel picked up a beacon from the plane’s black box almost a mile below the surface.
The Boeing 737 crashed into the Mediterranean Sea early on Monday just minutes after takeoff from Beirut in a fierce thunderstorm. All 90 people on board were feared dead.
A US Navy ship, the USS Ramage, detected signals from the black box flight recorders at 4,265 feet (1,300 metres) under the sea, the Lebanese army said on Thursday.
It could take days to find and retrieve the black box, which is key to determining the cause of the crash.
Aladar Nesser of US-based Odyssey Marine Explorations, which sent a ship to help in the search, said cables equipped with sonar stretch nearly 2 miles (3 kilometres) behind the ship and down to within 165 feet (50 metres) of the sea floor.
‘That provides a mapping of what’s down on the bottom of the sea,’ Nesser said.
‘That imagery is good enough to be able to distinguish the wreckage of the airplane.’
The location is far too deep for human divers and remotely operated devices would have to be used in a retrieval operation, he said.
Walid Noshie, a prominent Lebanese diver who also is helping the search, said the priority is to find the people on the plane, and then the black box.
Rescue teams have recovered some bodies and pieces of the plane, but hope for finding any survivors has faded. There are conflicting numbers of how many bodies have been found, although at least a dozen have been pulled out of the chilly waters.
The flight recorders are critical to determining what caused the crash. Lebanon’s transportation minister has said the plane made a ‘fast and strange turn’ after takeoff, and weather experts said lightning struck in the flight path around the time of the crash.
The Lebanese army and witnesses reported the plane was in flames as it went down.
Health officials have handed over to families the remains of several victims who were identified using DNA, Health Minister Mohammed Jawad Khalife said.
Many in Lebanon have already begun grieving for the crash victims.
Weeping relatives gathered in Beirut to mourn 2-year-old Julia al-Hajj, whose coffin was covered in flowers and a picture of the girl wearing a pink outfit with a tiny black bow.
Schoolchildren also gathered on the beach in Khalde, south of Beirut, on Thursday and threw yellow and orange flowers into the sea in a ceremony of mourning over the crash.
Lebanese officials also plan to send a team to Ethiopia to take DNA samples of victims’ families there, Lebanon’s state-run news agency said on Thursday. (AP writer Bassem Mroue contributed to this report)
