Algeria plane carrying 116 people disappears from radar

Spanish private airline company Swiftair said it lost contact with the Airbus 320 which was headed for Algiers.

ALGIERS // An Air Algerie flight carrying 116 people from Burkina Faso to Algeria’s capital disappeared from radar early Thursday over northern Mali, officials said.

France’s foreign minister said no wreckage had been found, but that the plane “probably crashed”.

Air navigation services lost track of the MD-83 about 50 minutes after takeoff from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, at 0155 GMT (5:55am UAE time).

“Despite an intensive search, at the moment I speak no trace of the aircraft has been found,” French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said in Paris. “The plane has probably crashed.”

Two French fighter jets are among aircraft scouring the rugged north of Mali for the plane.

Algerian aircraft were also flying over the region around Gao to try to locate wreckage, said Houaoui Zoheir, spokesman for the Algerian crisis centre. He provided no details on the type or number of aircraft, but said, “As long as we haven’t found the wreckage, we can’t talk of a crash. We talk of loss of contact.”

The plane, owned and operated by Spanish airline Swiftair, was carrying 110 passengers and six Spanish crew.

Passengers comprised of 51 French, 27 Burkina Faso nationals, eight Lebanese, six Algerians, five Canadians, four Germans, two Luxembourg nationals, one Swiss, one Belgian, one Egyptian, one Ukrainian, one Nigerian, one Cameroonian and one Malian, Burkina Faso transport minister Jean Bertin said.

The plane sent its last message around 0130 GMT (5:30am UAE time), asking Niger air control to change its route because of heavy rains in the area, Mr Ouedraogo said.

The disappearance of the Air Algerie plane comes after a spate of aviation disasters.

Fliers around the globe have been on edge ever since Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared in March on its way to Beijing. Searchers have yet to find a single piece of wreckage from the jet with 239 people on board.

Last week, a Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down by a surface-to-air missile while flying over a war-torn section of Ukraine. Then this week, US and European airlines cancelled flights to Tel Aviv after a rocket landed near the city’s airport. On Wednesday, a Taiwanese plane crashed during a storm, killing 48 people.

French transport minister Frederic Cuvillier said the Air Algerie flight vanished over northern Mali.

Mr Cuvillier did not specify exactly where the plane disappeared over Mali, or whether it was in an area controlled by rebels.

But Algerian prime minister Abdelmalek Sellal said on state television that 10 minutes before disappearing, it was in contact with air traffic controllers in Gao, a city essentially under the control of the Malian government, which has seen lingering separatist violence.

The plane had been missing for hours before the news was made public.

The flight path of the plane from Ouagadougou to Algiers wasn’t immediately clear. Ouagadougou is in a nearly straight line south of Algiers, passing over Mali where unrest continues in the north.

Northern Mali was under the control of ethnic Tuareg separatists before Al Qaeda-linked Islamic extremists took over in a military coup in 2012. A French-led intervention last year scattered the extremists, but the Tuaregs have pushed back against the authority of the Bamako-based government.

A senior French official said it seems unlikely that fighters in Mali had the kind of weaponry that could shoot down a plane.

The official said that they primarily have shoulder-fired weapons which are not enough to hit a passenger plane flying at cruising altitude.

Swiftair said the plane was built in 1996 and has two Pratt & Whitney JT8D-219 PW engines. It can carry up to 165 passengers.

Swiftair took ownership of the plane on October 24, 2012, after it spent nearly 10 months unused in storage, according to Flightglobal’s Ascend Online Fleets, which sells and tracks information about aircraft.

It has more than 37,800 hours of flight time and has made more than 32,100 takeoffs and landings. The plane has had several owners over the years, including Avianca and Austral Lineas Aereas.

The MD-83 is part of a series of jets built since the early 1980s by McDonnell Douglas, a US plane maker now owned by Boeing Co. The MD-80s are single-aisle planes that were a workhorse of the airline industry for short and medium-range flights for nearly two decades.

As jet fuel prices spiked in recent years, airlines have rapidly been replacing the jets with newer, fuel-efficient models such as Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s.

There are 496 other MD-80s being flown by airlines around the world, according to Ascend.

“We’re aware of reports on Air Algerie Flight AH5017,” Boeing spokesman Wilson Chow said. “Our team is gathering more information.”

* Associated Press