On a smooth white stage outside the Hotel Panorama, in the Angolan capital of Luanda, women pose and twirl to impress the judges of the 1999 Miss Luanda beauty contest.
Other crashes have also been blamed on deliberate actions by a pilot after a colleague had left the cockpit, including an Egypt Air flight in 1999 that killed 217, a Silk Air plane that crashed in Indonesia in 1997, killing 104, and LAM Flight 470 that came down en route between Maputo and Luanda in 2013 resulting in 33 fatalities.
While the elite in Luanda, the beach-front capital, enjoys European standards of living, the vast majority of Angolans struggles to attain the basics of life.
It erected the country's first shopping mall in the capital, Luanda.
The same was true of the port of Luanda two years ago.
Luanda, for instance, is now as much of a bottleneck as a gateway to Angola, as the world scrambles to pick up contracts from its burgeoning oil sector.
This is after all, one of Africa's worst regimes, with an abysmal human-rights record and life expectancy under 50.Other stop-off points are, like Equatorial Guinea, Africa's hottest investment destinations of the moment: Luanda, capital of Angola; Maputo, capital of Mozambique; and Lubumbashi, Congo's sprawling south-eastern mining city.
According to western diplomats in Luanda, a stream of middle-ranking American officers has visited the capital in recent weeks.Western ambassadors are quieter on the subject of the government's disdain for human rights, though they are keen that President Jose Edouardo dos Santos should hold an election to "legitimise" his regime.
Many diplomats, traders and others in Luanda believe the Angolan government is broke.
WHY has British Airways started a weekly flight from London to Luanda?
Soon these will stretch the whole way along the Marginal, the seafront road that is being turned into a grand six-lane highway sweeping around the horseshoe-shaped bay of Luanda, Angola's buzzing capital.
