Ethiopian Airlines flight makes an emergency landing in Dakar, no casualties recorded

October 9, 2019 3:34 PM

An Ethiopian Airlines plane forced landed few minutes after taking off in Senegal.

An Ethiopian Airlines plane (Twitter)

According to an airport spokesperson, Tidiane Tamba told Reuters that an engine caught fire hence the emergency landing.

All the 90 passengers and crew were not injured.

In a Twitter post, the airline confirmed that its Boeing 767 aircraft landed unexpectedly at Senegal’s Blaise Diagne International Airport near the capital Dakar due to “a technical problem”.

The post indicated that all the passengers were being rebooked on other flights.

This is coming months after Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 nose-dived into farmland outside the capital Addis Ababa, killing 157 people just minutes after takeoff.

This led to a global debate about the safety of a new Boeing 737 MAX model that had also crashed months before in Indonesia.

The preliminary reports in both cases mentioned the role of an automated system that erroneously pointed the plane’s nose down as pilots struggled to override it. 346 people died in the two crashes.