UTA Flight 141 was a charter flight operated by Union des Transports Aériens de Guinée .
On Christmas day, 25 December, 2003, the airplane crashed in the Bight of Benin, killing 151 of the 163 occupants, most of them Lebanese.
Flight 141 was flown on 3X-GDO, a Boeing 727-223, on the day of the crash. The airliner had begun its flight in Guinea and stopped in Sierra Leone and Benin on its way to Lebanon. Many of the passengers were workers who were flying back home to Lebanon to enjoy the holidays with their families.
The aircraft ran off the end of the runway and crashed into the ocean because it was severely overloaded with passengers and cargo and the aircraft's center of gravity was well out of limits, according to the French Civil Aviation Organization's investigation of the accident.
Some newspaper reports have led many to suspect that the airplane used for this flight was, in fact, an airplane that had disappeared about one year earlier, along with flight engineer and aircraft "repo man" Ben Charles Padilla.
Last updated: 10-18-2005 00:55:07
