Ethiopian Airlines announced on Saturday that it had suspended two of its pilots. They had fallen asleep while flying from Sudan to Ethiopia on Monday, missing their landing in Addis Ababa.
This incident was reported by the daily ‘New Zealand Herald’. According to this newspaper, the two pilots of a plane which linked Khartoum, Sudan, to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, fell asleep in mid-flight earlier this week.
Consequently, the Boeing 737 did not begin its descent on approach to the airport. The autopilot held the aircraft at an altitude of 11,000 meters.
The controllers tried several times to contact the pilots, but no one answered. It was only when the aircraft passed the landing strip that an alarm went off. This woke up the two pilots who turned around. The plane finally landed in Addis Ababa twenty minutes late.
The company said on Saturday it was investigating the incident, while stressing that the flight ended without any problems, even though the scheduled arrival time had been exceeded.
Ethiopian Airlines is one of the oldest airlines in Africa and operates a fleet of approximately 125 aircraft which serve some twenty domestic destinations and approximately 125 foreign destinations. It operates a fleet of airliners, including Airbus A350s, and cargo planes.
/ATS