Pilot screamed two terrifying words before plane crashed at 500mph killing 157 people

As the two pilots fought to keep Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in the air, the captain issued one last desperate command as the doomed airliner plummeted to earth

Wreckage lies at the crash site of Ethiopia Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 en route to Nairobi, Kenya, near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, 10 March 2019.

The horror crash claimed the lives of all 149 passengers and 8 crew members on board(Image: STR/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

The first inkling of disaster for a packed passenger plane was a simple message from their first officer, reporting a "flight control problem". Just over 10 minutes later all 157 people on board the aircraft were dead.

The brand-new Boeing 737 MAX 8 had taken off from runway 07R of Addis Ababa’s highland airport shortly after 8.30am on March 10, 2019. Within seconds of leaving the tarmac it was clear that there was a problem. An issue with the plane’s fly-by-wire systems caused it to begin to lose altitude.

Captain Yared Getachew, onboard the ill-fated Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, ordered his co-pilot to advise the control tower of the problem as he fought to keep the massive airliner stable.

Mohammed, realising that there was a problem with the Boeing’s Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which notoriously played a part in two fatal plane crashes, shouted out "Stab trim cut-out!” The pilots toggled switches to disable the aircraft's electrical trim tab system, which also deactivated the MCAS software.

But the catastrophic failure of multiple systems quickly overwhelmed the flight crew. They attempted unsuccessfully to manually adjust the plane’s stabilisers and. Three minutes into the flight, with the situation rapidly deteriorating, Captain Getachew ordered Mohammed to request permission from air traffic control to return to the airport.

Captain Yared Getachew

Captain Yared Getachew shouted 'pitch up' as the massive airliner nosedived into the ground(Image: Internet Unknown)

But the Boeing’s nose continued to pitch down, and flight tracking data showed that the aircraft’s erratic loss of height was worsening. Several witnesses stated the plane trailed "white smoke" and made strange noises as its fatal dive continued. One local farmer who watched as the aircraft plunged to the earth recalled seeing small items that “looked like paper” falling from the plane.

The last thing recorded on the plane’s cockpit voice recorder before it smashed into the ground at just under 500mph was the desperate plea: “Pitch up, pitch up!”

The airliner crashed into a field just 30 miles from the runway. All 157 people on board were killed instantly. The final dive had been so steep that the airliner had virtually drilled itself into the ground before shattering into thousands of pieces. For helicopter rescue pilots searching for survivors, the crash site was almost invisible.

People stand near collected debris at the crash site of Ethiopia Airlines near Bishoftu, a town some 60 kilometres southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The aircraft was destroyed by the massive impact(Image: AFP via Getty Images)

“When I went to the site, the plane was completely below ground,” said Ethiopian Airlines chief executive officer Tewolde Gebremariam, the CEO. “At that time, we knew there were no survivors.”

In April, 2019, Boeing formally acknowledged that its MCAS software played a role in the tragedy, as well as the loss of Indonesia’s Lion Air Flight 610 in 2018, which resulted in 189 fatalities. In January 2020, the company estimated a loss of $18.4 billion for 2019, and it reported 183 canceled MAX orders for the year.

The Boeing 737 MAX was grounded worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020 after the two similar crashes in less than five months, which claimed 346 lives. There was a second, brief suspension of 737 MAX flights in January 2024.

However the final accident report from the US National Transportation Safety Board, which routinely becomes involved in major air accident investigations, placed a share of the blame on the two pilots, saying: “Appropriate crew management of the event, per the procedures that existed at the time, would have allowed the crew to recover the airplane even when faced with the uncommanded nose-down inputs.”