TORONTO: Three generations of a Canadian family were among the 157 people who perished when Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 crashed on Sunday, a relative confirmed on Wednesday.

They were on their way to a Kenya vacation when the plane crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing passengers and crew from more than 30 countries.

Prerit Dixit, 43, and Kosha Vaidya, 37, their daughters and Ashka Dixit, 14, and Anushka Dixit, 13, and Vaidya’s parents Pannagesh Vaidya, 73, and Hansini Vaidya, 67, were among the 18 Canadians killed. They lived in Brampton, a Toronto suburb.

“This is terrible and tragic,” Manant Vaidya, brother of Kosha Vaidya, said. “It feels as if my whole support system has disappeared. I have no idea how we will cope up with this tragedy.”

The Dixit-Vaidya family was flying to Kenya so that Kosha Vaidya could show her Canadian-born daughters the country of her birth, Manant Vaidya said, adding his parents were returning there for the first time in more than 50 years.

Manant Vaidya works for the Reuters parent company Thomson Reuters. He plans to fly to Ethiopia on Saturday and from there to Mumbai for the final rituals of the deceased.

Dixit worked at medical-testing company LifeLabs as a lab technician and as a lab professional for Public Health Ontario. In email statements, both remembered his helpful and pleasant demeanor, his sense of humour and his dedication to family.

Kosha Vaidya had been a human resources adviser for the Canadian Hearing Society since 2017, the organisation said in a website statement, adding she would be “remembered for her intelligence, professionalism and dynamic personality.” Investigators in France took possession of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines jet’s black boxes on Thursday, seeking clues into a disaster that has grounded Boeing’s global 737 MAX fleet and left scores of families mourning and angry.

Relatives of the dead stormed out of a meeting with Ethiopian Airlines on Thursday, decrying a lack of transparency, while others made the painful trip to the crash scene.

“I can’t find you! Where are you?” said one Ethiopian woman, draped in traditional white mourning shawl, as she held a framed portrait of her brother in the charred and debris-strewn field.

Reuters