Author: Iliana Magra / Source: New York Times
Antonis Mavropoulos did everything he could to catch his connection, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302: He didn’t bring a suitcase. He was the first passenger off his plane. And when he got to the airport in Ethiopia, he ran.
He didn’t make it. A few hours later, he learned that what he thought was his misfortune was, in fact, the kind of spectacular good luck that can make you spend the rest of your life wondering about fate and chance.
Shortly after takeoff on Sunday, Flight 302 crashed en route to Nairobi, Kenya, killing all 149 passengers and eight crew members on board. Mr. Mavropoulos would have been the 150th passenger, window seat 2L.
“March 10 2019 — my lucky day,” Mr. Mavropoulos, the chief executive of a waste management company in Athens and president of the International Solid Waste Association, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable consumption, wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday.
He was on his way to Nairobi for the United Nations Environment Assembly when he missed his connecting flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His flight landed there at 7:40 a.m., and his flight to Nairobi left 35 minutes later, so he knew he had to hurry, he said in a telephone interview on Monday.
He was the first passenger to exit his flight at Addis Ababa, but an airline representative who had come to get him could not find him, he said.
He also did not have a suitcase, which meant he could move more quickly — but also that his connecting flight would not wait for his luggage to be transferred.
So he ran around the airport — “I was mad because there was no one to help me get…
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