A plane crashed shortly after takeoff from Ethiopia Sunday morning, killing all 157 people on board, including eight Americans, authorities said.
The Ethiopian Airlines flights was en route from the capital, Addis Ababa, to Nairobi, Kenya, when it lost contact around six minutes after takeoff, at 8:44 a.m. local time.
It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the new Boeing 737-8 MAX plane to go down.
But the pilot sent a distress call and was cleared to return to Bole International Airport.
The airline said 149 passengers and eight crew members were on board. Among them were people from over 30 countries.
Some of the passengers carried United Nations passports and were likely set to attend a major UN environmental conference in Nairobi on Monday.
The aircraft was the same model as the Lion Air jet that crashed in October, killing all 189 people on board. That crash was blamed on an automatic system that reportedly forced the plane’s nose down.