A Miraculous Escape: Guy Misses Doomed Ethiopia Airlines Flight After Arriving 2 Minutes Late
Antonis Mavropoulos is the President of the International Solid Waste Association. He was travelling to Nairobi to attend the annual assembly of the UN Environment Programme. The airport authorities said that they wanted to question him because he was the only passenger that booked the flight and wasn&rsquot on board.
An Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed shortly after take-off from Addis Ababa, killing all the 149 passengers and 8 crew members onboard. The crash happened six minutes after the flight took-off.
But there was one man who escaped a terrible fate by minutes. A Greek man said that he would have been the 150th passenger on the Nairobi-bound Ethiopian Airlines, except he arrived two minutes late for the flight.
'I was mad because nobody helped me to reach the gate on time', Antonis Mavropoulos said in a Facebook post titled 'My lucky day' in which he includes a photo of his ticket.
Mavropoulos is the President of the International Solid Waste Association which is a non-profit organisation, was travelling to Nairobi to attend the annual assembly of the UN Environment Programme, according to the Athens News Agency.
He was supposed to board the plane but he reached the departure gate just two minutes after it was shut.
'They led me to the police station of the airport. The officer told me not to protest but to pray to God because I was the only passenger that didn't board the ET 302 flight that was lost', Mavropoulos said in his post in which he admits to being in shock.
Accident Bulletin no. 5 Issued on March 11, 2019 at 07:08 AM Local Time pic.twitter.com/rwxa51Fgij
¡ª Ethiopian Airlines (@flyethiopian) March 11, 2019
The airport authorities said that they wanted to question him because he was the only passenger that booked the flight and wasn¡¯t on board.
"They said they couldn't let me go before cross-checking my identity, the reason I hadn't boarded the plane etc."
The flight took off early-morning on Sunday from Addis Ababa. People holding passports from more than 30 countries were on-board.
