An Ethiopian Airlines plane carrying 90 people caught fire and crashed into the Mediterranean shortly after takeoff Monday from Beirut, setting off a frantic search as rain lashed the coast and debris washed ashore.
No survivors had been found by nightfall, and Health Minister Mohammed Jawad Khalife told reporters that emergency workers had recovered 21 bodies, not 34 as initially reported.
The cause of the crash was not immediately known. Lebanon has been slammed by bad weather since Sunday night, with thunder, lightning and pouring rain.
Lebanese President Michel Suleiman said terrorism was not suspected in the crash of Flight 409, which was headed for the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
"Sabotage is ruled out as of now," he said.
Relatives of the passengers streamed into Beirut's airport to wait for news as helicopters and naval ships were scrambled for a rescue effort.
Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, who announced a day of mourning and closed schools and government offices, visited the airport to meet distraught relatives waiting for news of survivors, some of whom were angry that the plane was allowed to take off in bad weather.
"They should have delayed the flight for an hour or two to protect the passengers. There had been strong lightning bolts and we hear that lighting strikes at planes especially during take-offs," a relative of one of the passengers told a local television station.
Andree Qusayfi said his brother, 35-year-old Ziadh, was traveling to Ethiopia for work at a computer company.
"We begged him to postpone his flight because of the storm," Qusayfi said, his eyes red from crying. "But he insisted on going because he had work appointments."
'Please find my son'
Zeinab Seklawi said her 24-year-old son Yasser called her as he was boarding. "I told him, 'God be with you,' and I went to sleep," Seklawi said.
She begged reporters at the airport for information, saying: "Please find my son, I know he's alive and wouldn't leave me."
The wife of Denis Pietton, the French ambassador to Lebanon, was on the plane, according to the French embassy.
The dead include several children, according to a Lebanese defense official who asked that his name not be used because he is not authorized to speak to publicly.
According to one source, residents on the coast saw a "ball of fire" crashing off Na'ameh.
One witness, Khaled Naser, a gas station attendant who saw the plane go down, said: "We saw fire falling down from the sky into the sea."
The Boeing 737-800 took off around 2:30 a.m. local time (7:30 p.m. EST) and went down 2 miles off the coast, said Ghazi Aridi, the public works and transportation minister. The Lebanese army said in a statement the plane was "on fire shortly after takeoff."
"The weather undoubtedly was very bad," Aridi told reporters at the airport.
Ethiopian Airlines CEO Girma Wake said he did not think the crew would have taken off in dangerous weather conditions.
"There was bad weather. How bad it is, I will not be able to say. But, from what I see, probably it was manageable weather otherwise the crew would not have taken off," he told reporters in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
Plane serviced last month
Wake told journalists in Addis Ababa that he had no information on the fate of those on board or about the cause of the crash. He said the aircraft had been serviced on Dec. 25 and passed inspection.
He also said the plane had been leased in September from CIT Aerospace. Calls to CIT Aerospace were not immediately returned.
The Boeing 737 is considered one of the safest planes in airline service. The jet was first introduced in the 1960s, and today is the workhorse on many short- and medium-range routes.
Still, over the past 15 years it was involved in a series of incidents and crashes linked to a valve in the rudder assembly. This reportedly would malfunction and cause the rudder to turn independently of the pilot's commands.
The problem was considered resolved after operators of older Boeing 737s were ordered to carry out inspections and upgrades of the critical rudder control systems.
Sidney Dekker, a professor of flight safety at the School of Aviation at Lund University in Sweden, said the rudder problem has been corrected by the manufacturer and that he'd be "hugely surprised" if it had anything to do with the crash.
Dekker, himself a 737 pilot, said that if reports of an engine fire proved to be correct, the accident could have possibly resulted from a loss of control at a relatively low altitude where it would have been difficult to recover.
He noted that the 737's engines were overpowered in order to fulfill single-engine takeoff performance requirements. In the case of the loss of an engine, this tended to produce a turning movement — known as yaw — toward the dead engine.
Poor visibility in low clouds combined with high winds may have contributed to the problem faced by the pilots trying to regain control, he said.
'Cataclysmic failure' of engine?
Aviation safety analyst Chris Yates said it was far too early to say what caused the crash, but he noted that modern aircraft are built to withstand all but the foulest weather conditions.
"One wouldn't have thought that a nasty squall in and of itself would be the prime cause of an accident like this," said Yates, an analyst based in Manchester, England. He noted that reports of fire could suggest "some cataclysmic failure of one of the engines" or that something had been sucked into the engine, such as a bird or debris.
The shore near where the plane hit the sea was littered with pieces of the plane along with mangled passenger seats, a fire extinguisher and bottles of medicine.
The plane was carrying 90 people, including 83 passengers and 7 crew. Aridi, the transportation minister, identified the passengers as 54 Lebanese, 22 Ethiopians, one Iraqi, one Syrian, one Canadian of Lebanese origin, one Russian of Lebanese origin, a French woman and two Britons of Lebanese origin.
Ethiopian Airlines reported that there were 82 passengers and eight crew; the discrepancy could not immediately be explained.
Ethiopian airlines has regular flights to Lebanon, catering for business clients and the thousands of Ethiopians who work there as domestic helpers. Lebanese aviation sources said some of the passengers had been en route to Angola and other African countries.
Ethiopian Airlines has long had a reputation for high-quality service compared to other African airlines, with two notable crashes in more than 20 years.
A hijacked Ethiopian Airlines jet crash-landed off the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean when it ran out of fuel in November 1996, killing 126 of the 175 people aboard. The plane had just left Addis Ababa when three hijackers stormed the cockpit and demanded to be taken to Australia.
In September 1988, an Ethiopian Airlines jet crashed shortly after taking off when it ran into a flock of birds, killing 31 of the 104 people on board.
The crash is the fifth incident involving the loss of a Boeing 737-800, according to the Flight Safety Foundation.
Boeing said it is coordinating with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board to assist Lebanese authorities in the investigation.
