Very sad indeed! Lets pray for the families of the crew and passengers at this trying moment.

Hopefully the get survivors.

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An Ethiopian Airlines plane with 92 passengers and crew on board crashed into the Mediterranean Sea in stormy weather shortly after taking off from Beirut international airport in the early hours of Monday.

‘‘Ethiopian Airline Flight 409 crashed about five minutes after takeoff at 2:30am (local time) with 83 passengers and nine crew members,’’ the airport official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

He said witnesses saw a ball of fire as the jet plunged into the sea.

The official said rescuers were trying to reach the plane to see if there were any survivors.

The plane, said to be a Boeing 737 by one source, disappeared off the radar about five minutes after take-off. It had flown in from Addis Ababa earlier in the night, the sources said.

About 50 passengers were Lebanese nationals, most of the others were Ethiopians, the sources said.

http://www.theage.com.au...port-20100125-mtoa.html
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Very sad news indeed.
I have been flying for sometime now but I still get kiasi jitters everytime I board a plane, notwithstanding the fact that air transport is one of the safest modes of transport in the world (it is said donkeys kill more people annually than aircraft crashes, meaning this year donkeys are expected to kill at least >92 pips).

Those in aviation, is there anything like the safest seat in a plane, one where survival chances are highest? Near the tail? Near the cockpit? I would imagine seats at the wings are the deadliest location as thats where fuel tanks are situated.

I hope we get survivors in the ET crash.

'in bad eather'. when a flight crashes in bad weather....is it for lfailure of navigation equipment or too much physical disturbance.

Lately most plane crashes have been caused by bad weather from the KQ in cameroon to the brazilian crash and now the ethiopian plane .

Cant these aviation authorities ground planes which use route with bad weather forcast or do they care more on the lost revenue.

@selah - Weather reporting is not always accurate. And the idea is to fly ABOVE the storm but the storm may have shifted AFTER the flight has taken off.

Well, the decision lies with the pilot.

I read (but I do not have the link) that the KQ pilot in Cameroon was told about the weather but still took off. Apparently, there were other planes that remained on the tarmac.

The newer planes are supposed to have better instrumentation as well.

It is sad what has happened to Ethiopian which with KQ is among the better African airlines.

My condolences to the families of the passengers and the crew. However the Air France puzzle may never be solved, unlike today's and the Cameroon crashes the experts can diagnose what really went wrong as the crash happened during the most critical period of flight. The only similarity being both equipments are boeing 737-800!
When planes are in cruising mode they do not just disappear from the radar without trace not unless something which is very difficult to explain happens.

The was a sharp drop in KQ prices from 54.50 to 50.50. Was this entirely due to the Ethiopian accident or just mainly due to a correction at the NSE? In any case how far do the wazua gurus expect the reduction to go ... 40 ... 45 ... or just 50?