Yahoo – AFP,
24 July 2014
 |
A Swiftair
MD-83 airplane is seen in this undated photo. Authorities have lost
contact
with an Air Algerie flight en route from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to
Algiers
with 110 passengers on board, Algeria's APS state news agency and a
Spanish
airline company said on Thursday. (REUTERS/Xavier Larrosa)
|
Algiers
(AFP) - Air Algerie said Thursday it had lost contact with one of its passenger
aircraft nearly an hour after takeoff from Burkina Faso bound for Algiers.
A company
source told AFP that the missing aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 and that
some 110 people of various nationalities are listed as being on board the
flight.
The source
said contact with the aircraft was lost while it was still in Malian airspace
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.
"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 Air Algerie source
said.
"Contact
was lost after the change of course."
The airline
announced that the plane had gone missing in a brief statement carried by
national news agency APS.
"Air
navigation services have lost contact with an Air Algerie plane Thursday flying
from Ouagadougou to Algiers, 50 minutes after takeoff," the statement
said.
It added
that the company 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.
 |
Air Algerie
loses contact with plane over west Africa
|
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.
Experts to begin probe into Air Algerie crash
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