In third air disaster in a week, Air Algerie plane crashes with 116 people on board
Passenger list includes 50 French, 24 Burkinabe, eight Lebanese, four Algerians, two from Luxembourg and solo travellers from Belgium, Switzerland, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ukraine and Romania
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 24 July, 2014, 5:22pm
UPDATED : Friday, 25 July, 2014, 4:43am
Agencies in Algiers, Paris, Bamako and Cairo
A Swiftair McDonnell Douglas MD-83. Photo: Reuters
An Air Algerie flight carrying 116 people that went missing en route from the Burkina Faso capital Ouagadougou to Algiers has crashed, an Algerian aviation official confirmed on Thursday.
Mali's president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta says wreckage of the plane has been spotted between northern towns of Aguelhoc and Kidal, Reuters reported.
According to an earlier Air Algerie statement, air navigation services lost track of the MD-83 aircraft about 50 minutes after take-off. French public radio said that due to poor visibility over Mali, which is next to Algeria, the plane changed course.
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An Air Algerie representative in Burkina Faso, Kara Terki, told a news conference that all the passengers on the plane were in transit, either for Europe, the Middle East or Canada.
He said the passenger list included 50 French, 24 Burkinabe, eight Lebanese, four Algerians, two from Luxembourg, one Belgian, one Swiss, one Nigerian, one Cameroonian, one Ukrainian and one Romanian. Lebanese officials said there were at least 10 Lebanese citizens on the flight.
A spokeswoman for SEPLA, Spain’s pilots union, said the six crew members were from Spain.
There were no clear indications of what might of happened to the flight en route north to Algiers, but Burkino Faso Transport Minister Jean Bertin Ouedrago said the aircraft asked to change route at 1.38am because of a storm in the area.
A weather satellite image at the time of the last contact with flight AH5017 shows thunderstorms in the area. Photo: SCMP Pictures
Algeria’s state news agency APS said authorities lost contact with flight AH5017 an hour after it took off from Burkina Faso, but other officials gave differing accounts of the times of contact, adding to confusion about the fate of the flight and where it might be.
Whatever its fate, the loss of contact is likely to add to nerves in the airline industry after a Malaysia Airlines plane was downed over Ukraine last week, a TransAsia Airways crashed off Taiwan during a thunderstorm on Wednesday and airlines cancelled flights into Tel Aviv due to the conflict in Gaza.
Swiftair said on its website the aircraft took off from Burkina Faso at 1.17am and was supposed to land in Algiers at 5.10am but never reached its destination.
An Algerian aviation official said the last contact Algerian authorities had with the missing Air Algerie aircraft was at 1.55am when it was flying over Gao, Mali.
Aviation authorities in Burkina say they handed the flight to the control tower in Niamey, Niger, at 1.38am. They said the last contact with the flight was just after 3.30am.
Ouagadougou airport, Burkina Faso. Photo: SCMP Pictures
Burkina Faso Transport Minister Jean Bertin Ouedrago said the flight asked the control tower in Niamey to change route at 1.38am because of a storm in the Sahara.
However, a source in the control tower in Niamey, who declined to be identified, said it had not been contacted by the plane, which in theory should have flown over Mali.
Unconfirmed reports on CCTV's official microblog on Thursday evening said that a MD-83 airliner operated by Swiftair had crashed hear Niamey, capital city of Niger, with 110 passengers and six crew members on board.
Burkinabe authorities have set up a crisis unit in Ouagadougou airport to provide information to families of people on the flight.
A diplomat in the Malian capital Bamako said that the north of the country – which lies on the plane’s likely flight path – was struck by a powerful sandstorm overnight.
Issa Saly Maiga, head of Mali’s National Civil Aviation Agency, said that a search was under way for the missing flight.
“We do not know if the plane is Malian territory,” he told reporters. “Aviation authorities are mobilised in all the countries concerned – Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Algeria and even Spain.”
Aviation websites said the missing aircraft, one of four MD-83s owned by Swiftair, was 18 years old. The aircraft’s two engines are made by Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies.
US planemaker McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing, stopped producing the MD-80 airliner family in 1999 but it remains in widespread use. According to British consultancy Flightglobal Ascend, there are 482 MD-80 aircraft in operation, many of them in the United States.
“Boeing is aware of the report [on the missing aircraft]. We are awaiting additional information,” a spokesman for the planemaker said.
Swiftair has a relatively clean safety record, with five accidents since 1977, two of which caused a total of eight deaths, according to the Washington-based Flight Safety Foundation.
Air Algerie’s last major accident was in 2003 when one of its planes crashed shortly after take-off from the southern city of Tamanrasset, killing 102 people. In February this year, 77 people died when an Algerian military transport plane crashed into a mountain in eastern Algeria.
