The New York Times

An Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed into the Mediterranean Sea on Monday morning shortly after it took off from Beirut International Airport in stormy weather. Officials said that 82 passengers and 8 crew members were on board.

“The flight lost contact with Lebanese air traffic controllers shortly after takeoff,” said Wogayehu Terefe, a spokeswoman for Ethiopian Airlines. She added that a rescue crew was headed to the crash site to see if anyone had survived.

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 — a Boeing 737 — had been scheduled to take off at 2:10 a.m., according to the company’s Web site, but it actually left at 2:30. The 1,730-mile flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, was scheduled to take 4 hours and 40 minutes.

A Lebanese aviation official told The Associated Press that the plane disappeared from the radar 45 minutes after taking off from Beirut.

Although African airlines in general have a shaky safety record, Ethiopian Airlines has a relatively good history. In a 1996 hijacking, however, one of its planes ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea.

Reuters reported that residents on the coast saw a plane on fire crashing.

Flight safety records indicate that there has not been a crash involving Beirut International Airport since 1987.

The Boeing 737 is one of the most widely used planes in the world, and while it has a fine overall safety record, it has been involved in a few crashes in Europe and Africa in recent years.

There have been questions about the plane’s rudders, notably in a 1994 crash near Pittsburgh in which a plane inexplicably fell out of the sky from about 8,000 feet.