Lebanese authorities were so incensed at seeing “Tel Aviv” on the side of an Ethiopian Airlines 787-9 Dreamliner aircraft that Africa’s largest air carrier was forced to remove it before it could take off from Beirut. No folks, this is not The Onion….
Ethiopian Airlines 787-9 With “Tel Aviv” Written On Fuselage Not Welcome In Lebanon
I’ll never forget my first visit to Beirut. It was 2011, back when Israel still stamped passports, and my passport back then was as thick and big as…well, it was nice back in the day when instead of a 50-page limit, you could keep adding sections to your passport.
My passport had several appendages and was full of unique stamps and visas. Upon presentation of my passport at the immigration counter after a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul, an agent proceeded to spend several minutes carefully looking over every stamp on every page for any evidence of having visited Israel.
If Lebanon sees evidence of visiting Israel, they will deny you entry…which is rather ironic considering they do not believe Israel exists. Kind of hard to block someone from visiting an imaginary country…
Well, I had been in Israel the summer before, but thankfully I had asked that my passport not be stamped and had peeled off my security sticker on the back of the passport, so there were no issues…I was welcomed in.
And let me add here that the Lebanese people are lovely and Beirut is a beautiful city. But Israel and Lebanon are technically in a state of war and Hezbollah terrorists use Lebanon as a launchpad for strikes within Israel.
So when an Ethiopian Airlines Dreamliner landed at Rafic Al Hariri International Airport in Beirut (BEY), it was quite a problem when someone noticed that the plane said “Tel Aviv” aside.
First, a bit of backstory. As noted by One Mile At A Time, Ethiopian Airlines has a fun tradition whereby it writes the name of the first city that a particular aircraft flies to when it first enters commercial service. In the case of ET-AXK, a four-year-old 787-9, the first flight was from Addis Ababa (ADD) to Tel Aviv (TLV), hence the “Tel Aviv” name on the fuselage.
But the Directorate General of Civil Aviation in Lebanon did that find that fun or cute or acceptable. Instead, Ethiopian Airlines was told to remove “Tel Aviv” before it took off from Beirut and to ensure that it never flew that aircraft into Lebanon again…
#triggered
Surprisingly, the flight took off 90 minutes later with “Tel Aviv” removed. Was it spray paint or was the lettering just stickers?
Ethiopian Airlines, you have been warned!
CONCLUSION
Lebanese authorities were not happy about an Ethiopian Airlines 787-9 that landed in Beirut with “Tel Aviv” on its fuselage. So upset were they that Ethuopan had to remove it before the aircraft could return to Addis Ababa.
Good thing the 787 did not try to land at a US university…
