Nairobi: Africa’s largest airline, Ethiopian Airlines, has announced that it has suspended two pilots who reportedly fell asleep during a flight from Khartoum to Addis Ababa and failed to land. The plane flew over the runway at Ethiopia’s capital Bole International Airport on Monday and landed safely, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware. According to independent website The Aviation Herald, the pilot fell asleep during the flight and was only awakened by an alarm triggered when his autopilot mode was disconnected. According to flight data, the plane made a turn and landed after 25 minutes.
London-based aviation analyst Alex Macheras described the incident as “extremely disturbing” and blamed it on widespread fatigue, which poses a major threat to aviation safety. Fatigue is nothing new and continues to pose one of the most significant threats to aviation safety internationally,” he posted on Twitter. In March 2019, a Boeing 737 MAX operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed in a field southeast of Addis Ababa six minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board. Five months after a similar crash in Indonesia, the disaster grounded jets globally for 20 months before returning to service in late 2020. 2020-2021.
