(Bloomberg) — An international salvage force including UnitedNations and French troops rushed to secure the site of the downedAir Algerie MD-83, which crashed in Mali en route to Algiers fromBurkina Faso, leaving no survivors.

The group, which includes more than 200 French and Maliansoldiers, was deployed to a thinly populated semi-arid area nearthe Burkina Faso border where Flight AH5017 crashed at about 2 a.m.yesterday. The plane, carrying 110 passengers and six crew, wasformally identified by the French military earlier today, which hassecured the site and found one black box.

“The plane has disintegrated and we have only seen fragments andpieces of bodies,” Burkina Faso Prime Minister Luc-Adolphe Tiaosaid at a press conference in Ouagadougou, the capital. Identifyingbodies may be difficult, he said.

The loss of the plane caps a week of aviation disasters thatincludes the downing of a Malaysian Air Boeing Co. 777 over easternUkraine on July 17 following a suspected missile strike, killingall 298 people on board. On July 23, an ATR-72 turbo- prop crashedon the Penghu Islands in Taiwan, leaving 48 people dead. Recoveringthe wreckage and may prove difficult as some of the debris iscovered by rainwater, Burkinabe authorities said.

While weather may have been a factor, “it is too early to drawany conclusions,” French President Francois Hollande said at apress conference following a meeting of the inner cabinet in Paristoday. “There are unfortunately no survivors.”

'Sad Week'

According to Seyibo Zamtou, a representative of continent- wideair navigation security agency Asecna, the plane was flying at 800kilometers an hour (500 miles) and began slowing down and losingaltitude in “an abnormal fall.”

The site of the crash is about 80 kilometers away from the Malitown of Gossi, and accessing the area can take as long as six hoursbecause of the rugged terrain and adverse weather conditions,according to French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.

“This has been a very sad week for everyone involved withaviation,” International Air Transport Association Chief ExecutiveOfficer Tony Tyler said in a statement. The Air Algerie incidenttakes the potential 2014 death toll to 680 travelers, higher thanthe 12-month totals for the past three years, according toair-safety consultants Ascend Worldwide.

Sahel Zone

Some 54 French citizens were aboard the Air Algerie plane,according to the government. Communications Minister Alain EdouardTraore said 28 Burkina Faso citizens were on board, and declared anational mourning. Other passengers include eight people fromLebanon, six Algerians, five Canadians and four Germans, Swiftairsaid. Two citizens of Luxembourg were also on board, according tothe country's Foreign Ministry.

The aircraft asked the control tower in Niamey, Niger, to divertbecause of a storm about 40 minutes after taking off, said YoussoufOuedraogo, the Burkina Faso foreign minister, without saying wherehe got the information. Amidou Zerbo, a forecaster at theOuagadougou airport, said the zone was stormy when the planecrashed and “dangerous from an aeronautic point of view” because ofthe rainy season.

Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali share a border in the southernSahel, a semi-arid zone below the Sahara desert that is sparselypopulated and with few roads. The Sahel stretches more than 5,400kilometers across Africa from Senegal in the west to Sudan in theeast.

MD-83 planes belong to a family of twin-engine, short- tomedium-range, single-aisle commercial airliners that wereintroduced in 1980. They were built by McDonnell Douglas Corp.,acquired by Boeing Co. in 1997. The Swiftair MD-83 was built in1996 and equipped with two Pratt & Whitney JT8D-219 PWengines.

Assistance

In a statement Boeing said it was “ready to provide technicalassistance to government authorities who will investigate theaccident.”

Other incidents involving the model include the loss of anAlaska Airlines flight over the Pacific ocean in 2000, caused byinadequate maintenance, which killed all 88 people on board. In2012, a Dana Airlines flight from the Nigerian capital, Abuja,crashed into the heavily populated Agege suburb of Lagos killing153 people on board and 10 on the ground.

Swiftair, a private company created in 1986, has more than 400employees and has a fleet of more than 30 planes, which includemodels such as the Boeing 727 and 737, MD-83, ATR-72/-42, Embraer120 and Metroliner, according to its website. Customers listed onthe site include Fedex Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc., andthe company also services corporate clients and tour operators.

Air Algerie has had seven fatal airplane accidents since 1960,according to the Aviation Safety Network website. The most recentaccident happened in 2003, when 102 passengers and crew were killedon a Boeing 737, according to the network. The plane stalled on aflight to Algiers and crashed into rocky terrain beyond the runway,ASN said.

While only one western-built jet hull was lost in Africa lastyear, the continent's safety record is still worse than anywhereelse in the world, according to the IATA. There were 7.45 accidentsper million flights in Africa in 2013, compared with a global rateof one accident for every 2.4 million flights, IATA said inApril.

–With assistance from Charles Penty in Madrid, AndreaRothman in Toulouse, Tarek El-Tablawy in Cairo, Andres R. Martinezand Pauline Bax in Accra, Francois Rihouay in Bamako, HeleneFouquet and Gregory Viscusi in Paris and Chris Cooper inTokyo.

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