Air Algerie With About 120 Passengers Reportedly Missing Over Mali

Source: pointblanknews.com

ALGIERS- An Air Algerie plane with around 120 people on board including

French and Spanish nationals went missing Thursday during a flight from

Burkina Faso to Algiers, company sources and officials said.

Aviation sources told AFP the aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-83

leased from Spanish company Swiftair carrying passengers of different

nationalities.
Its six-member crew were all Spanish, said Spain's airline pilots' union

Sepla, while Swiftair confirmed the aircraft had gone missing less than an

hour after takeoff from Ouagadougou.
Many French nationals were thought to be on board the plane, France's

Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier said in Paris.

He said after a government meeting that top civil aviation officials were

holding an emergency meeting and a crisis cell had been set up.

Earlier reports had said the plane was a DC-9.
“The plane disappeared at Gao (in Mali), 500 kilometres (300 miles) from

the Algerian border. Several nationalities are among the victims,” Prime

Minister Abdelmalek Sellal was cited as saying by Algerian radio.

The Air Algerie source earlier said contact was lost while the airliner

was still in Malian airspace and approaching the border with Algeria.

Despite international military intervention still under way, the situation

remains unstable in northern Mali, which was seized by jihadist groups for

several months in 2012.
On July 17, the Bamako government and armed groups from northern Mali

launched tough talks in Algiers aimed at securing an elusive peace deal,

and with parts of the country still mired in conflict.

- 'Contact lost' -
“The plane was not far from the Algerian frontier when the crew was asked

to make a detour because of poor visibility and to prevent the risk of

collision with another aircraft on the Algiers-Bamako route,” the airline

source said.
“Contact was lost after the change of course.”
The carrier, in a statement carried by national news agency APS, said it

initiated an “emergency plan” in the search for flight AH5017, which flies

the four-hour passenger route four times a week.
One of Algeria's worst air disasters occurred in February this year, when

a C-130 military aircraft carrying 78 people crashed in poor weather in

the mountainous northeast, killing more than 70 people.

The plane was flying from the desert garrison town of Tamanrasset in

Algeria's deep south to Constantine, 320 kilometres (200 miles) east of

Algiers.
Tamanrasset was the site of the country's worst ever civilian air

disaster, in March 2003.
In that accident, all but one of 103 people on board were killed when an

Air Algerie passenger plane crashed on takeoff after one of its engines

caught fire.
The sole survivor, a young Algerian soldier, was critically injured.

In December 2012, two Algerian military jets on a routine training mission

collided in mid-air near Tlemcen in the northwest, killing both pilots.

A month earlier, a twin-turboprop CASA C-295 military transport aircraft,

which was carrying a cargo of paper for the printing of banknotes in

Algeria, crashed in southern France.
The five soldiers and one central bank representative on board were all

killed.