Ethiopian crash: high ideals lost among wreckage of shattered lives
What little was left was heartbreaking: A battered passport. A shredded book. Business cards in many languages.
What little was left was heartbreaking: A battered passport. A shredded book. Business cards in many languages.
Searchers in white gloves and canvas shoes picked their way through the scattered remains of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, gingerly lifting from the scorched earth the pieces of 157 lives.
The tattered book, its pages singed, appeared to be about macroeconomics, its passages highlighted by a careful reader in yellow and pink.
There was a shattered keyboard. And playfully printed T-shirts. There was even a plaintively ringing mobile phone, picked up by a stranger and silenced.
The dead came from 35 countries. As their identities slowly emerged from shocked families, governments and employers, a common strand became clear. The flight that set off Sunday morning from Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, faltered and ploughed into the earth six minutes later was full of people unafraid to take on the world and its problems — and explore it, too.
The Boeing 737 Max 8 held 32 people from neighbouring Kenya, including a law student and a football official, a toll that left the country numb. Ethiopia lost 18 lives. Others came from afar, to work or play: a satirist, a former ambassador, tourists, an accountant.
But the number of humanitarian workers was shocking. There were doctors, a child protection worker, advocates, environmental activists.
They carried high ideals obscured by mundane, bureaucratic names: briefing papers, capacity-building initiatives.
Addis Ababa and the plane’s destination, Nairobi, are popular hubs for aid workers addressing some of the world’s most pressing crises: Somalia, South Sudan, climate change, hunger.
“They all had one thing in common — a spirit to serve the people of the world and to make it a better place for us all,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.
At least 21 UN staffers were killed, he said, along with an unknown number of people who had worked closely with the world body.
The UN flag flew at half-mast, and Ethiopia marked a day of mourning for all.
Save the Children. The Norwegian Refugee Agency. The Red Cross of Norway. The International Committee for the Development of Peoples. The African Diaspora Youth Forum in Europe. All mourned their colleagues.
A steady wind blew as more remains were found, flashes of humanity among the gritty pieces of hull and wheel.
Beyond the yellow tape around the crash site at Tulu Fara, 60km east of Addis Ababa, huddled figures wrapped in blankets watched in silence as inspectors searched the site and excavated it with a mechanical digger.
The single-aisle Boeing jet had left a deep, black crater.
Half a world away, US regulators ordered Boeing to make urgent improvements to its popular 737 Max 8 aircraft, and Singapore banned the use of the hi-tech jet in its airspace, becoming the latest in a growing list of countries worried about the safety of the flagship plane. Sunday’s crash came only five months after a Lion Air jet of the same model crashed in Indonesia, killing 189.
The US Federal Aviation Administration said it was ordering Boeing to improve anti-stalling software and the model’s manoeuvring system, giving the company until the end of April to make the updates. But the body ruled out grounding the fleet for now, saying investigations had “just begun” and so far no data had been provided to “draw any conclusions or take any actions”.
Singapore’s ban comes after China ordered domestic airlines to suspend commercial operations of the 737 Max 8, and Indonesia grounded its entire fleet of the jets for inspections.
Ethiopian Airlines has grounded its remaining Max 8 jets, while airlines in South Africa, Brazil and Mexico have taken theirs out of service and pilots from Argentina’s Aerolineas Argentinas are refusing to fly them.
The Malaysian government ordered an urgent review of orders for several Max aircraft by flag carrier Malaysia Airlines.
Boeing has described the Max series as its fastest-selling family of planes, with more than 5000 orders placed to date from about 100 customers.
But not since the 1970s — when the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 had successive fatal incidents — has a new model been involved in two deadly accidents in such a short period.
The weekend crash sent Boeing shares nosediving as much as 12 per cent. The plane involved in Sunday’s crash was less than four months old, delivered to Ethiopian Airlines on November 15.
AP, AFP
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