UTA Flight 141

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**UTA Flight 141**
Summary
Date	December 25, 2003
Type	Take-off crash
Site	Cotonou Airport, Benin
Fatalities	141
Injuries	24 (1 on ground)
Aircraft
Aircraft type	Boeing 727-223
Operator	Union des Transports Aériens de Guinée
Tail number	3X-GDO
Passengers	153
Crew	10
Survivors	22

UTA Flight 141 was a charter flight operated by Union des Transports Aériens de Guinée.

On 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, an ex-American Airlines 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 via Libya. 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, impacting several ground structures including an occupied outbuilding and crashed on the ocean beach 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.

Exact passenger numbers are impossible to determine, as it is thought that there were more passengers aboard than were listed on the manifest.

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. This rumor turned out to be unfounded.