"I had a bad feeling." Ethiopian Airlines crash victim's mother warned her not to board the flight.

The mother of Ethiopian Airlines crash victim Ekaterina Polyakova, who was killed alongside her husband Alexander Polyakov yesterday, says she had a “bad feeling” and asked her daughter not to board the plane.

According to the Daily Mail, she insisted that her daughter and son-in-law not board that flight in particular, despite being uneasy about the entire trip.

“I had a bad feeling. I tried to talk them out of this travel and of this flight in particular. But my daughter said that everything would be okay,” she reportedly said.

“I was very worried on the eve of their flight but could do nothing to stop them,” she added.

The young couple worked for a Russian bank, where Ekaterina was an accountant and her husband, Alexander, was a coder.

The Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 passenger jet to Nairobi killed 149 passengers and eight crew, and was the same model that crashed during a Lion Air flight in Indonesia in October 2018.

Sunday’s flight left Bole airport in Addis Ababa at 8.38am on Sunday before losing contact with the control tower just a few minutes later at 8.44am.

“The group CEO who is at the scene right now deeply regrets to confirm there are no survivors,” the airline tweeted alongside a picture of Tewolde GebreMariam in a suit holding a piece of debris inside a large crater.

Passengers from 33 countries were aboard, said Tewolde in a news conference. The dead included Kenyan, Ethiopian, American, Canadian, French, Chinese, Egyptian, Swedish, British and Dutch citizens.

No Australians were listed among the passengers at this time.

At Nairobi airport, many relatives of passengers were left waiting at the gate for hours, with no information from airport authorities. Some learned of the crash from journalists.

“We’re just waiting for my mum. We’re just hoping she took a different flight or was delayed. She’s not picking up her phone,” said Wendy Otieno, clutching her phone and weeping.

Robert Mutanda, 46, was waiting for his brother-in-law, a Canadian citizen.

“No, we haven’t seen anyone from the airline or the airport,” he told Reuters at 1pm, more than three hours after the flight was lost. “Nobody has told us anything, we are just standing here hoping for the best.”

Flight ET 302 crashed near the town of Bishoftu, 62 kilometres southeast of the capital Addis Ababa, the airline said.

“The pilot mentioned that he had difficulties and that he wanted to return. He was given the clearance (to return back),” said Tewolde during his news conference.

The flight had unstable vertical speed after take off, said flight tracking website Flightradar24 on its Twitter feed.

The aircraft had shattered into many pieces and was severely burnt, a Reuters reporter at the scene of the crash said.

It’s not clear what caused the crash. Boeing sent condolences to the families and said it was ready to help investigate.

“A Boeing technical team is prepared to provide technical assistance at the request and under the direction of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board,” the company said in a statement.

This is the second recent crash of the relatively new 737 MAX 8, the latest version of Boeing’s workhorse narrowbody jet that first entered service in 2017.

The same model crashed into the Java Sea shortly after take-off from Jakarta on October 29, killing all 189 people on board the Lion Air flight.

The cause of that crash is still under investigation. A preliminary report issued in November, before the cockpit voice recorder was recovered, focused on airline maintenance and training and the response of a Boeing anti-stall system to a recently replaced sensor, but did not give a reason for the crash. A final report is due later this year.

The plane is the latest version of the 737, the world’s best-selling modern passenger aircraft and one of the industry’s most reliable.

With AAP. 

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