157 people were killed when a Boeing crashed on the way from Ethiopia to Kenya. Antonis Mavropoulos should also have been aboard the plane - he had booked the place 2L in Business Class.
But because he arrived two minutes late at the airport of Addis Ababa, he was not allowed to get on board. "I was still angry because no one helped me to get on the plane in time," Mavropoulos writes on his Facebook profile. Only a short time later he realized what luck had happened to him.
The pilot had reported technical problems shortly after take-off and asked to return to the airport in Addis Ababa. Just six minutes after taking off, the Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed at 8:44 am local time.
Asked by the police
When Mavropoulos wanted to take his replacement flight to Nairobi three hours later, he was stopped by the police. "The officer told me to stop protesting and to thank God instead, because I was the only passenger who had not boarded." He was asked why he had missed the flight.
He had lost the ground under his feet when he learned that the machine had crashed. Then he promptly informed his family that he was alive.
On Facebook, Mavropoulos shared the photo of his boarding pass and wrote: "There are millions of little threads that we almost never notice - but if one breaks, it's enough to destroy all the fabric." He was grateful that he was still alive and had received so much love and support from his friends. "And I apologize to my family for the shock she has suffered."
Like many other passengers, Mavropoulos wanted to attend the Annual General Assembly of the UN Environment Program in Nairobi. He is chairman of the nonprofit organization International Solid Waste Association.
The plane crash in Ethiopia also killed five Germans. In Ethiopia experts began on Monday with the identification of the victims and the clarification of the cause of the accident. On Sunday, a special commission had been set up for this purpose by air traffic control experts, the Ministry of Transport and the airline.
After the accident, the relatively new aircraft type Boeing 737 Max 8 is in the criticism. Due to safety concerns, aircraft of this type initially had to stay grounded in several countries. China, Indonesia and Ethiopia declared a start ban for all identical machines. Affected are at least 110 aircraft.
Already in October, 189 people were killed in the crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 of the Lion Air airline in Indonesia.
At the accident site near Addis Ababa, the so-called blackboxes were found after "laborious search", record the radio in the cockpit and all flight data, as Ethiopian Aiirlines announced. These are very important for the investigators in clarifying the cause of the accident. The black boxes are built so sturdy that they should normally survive a bad luck.
more on the subject
The manufacturer Boeing initially expressed no closer to the disaster. In a statement, the company expressed its condolences to the relatives of the victims and announced the deployment of experts to Ethiopia. These should help with the investigation of the cause of the accident.
Plane crash in Ethiopia: China prohibits flights on the Boeing 737 Max 8
DPA
On the stock exchange, the news triggered a price slide at Boeing. In Frankfurt's Xetra trading Boeing shares lost by noon almost nine percent in value, after it had risen almost a third since the beginning of the year.