(Bloomberg) — An Air Algerie MD-83 carrying 116 people crashed in the desolate Sahel region of north Africa as it approached Algier en route from Burkina Faso, marking the third major civil-aviation incident in a week.
Flight AH5017, which took off in the west African country shortly after midnight carrying 110 passengers and six Spanish crew, was scheduled to land at 5:10 a.m. local time, according to Swiftair, a charter company based in Spain. The jet crashed about three hours earlier, 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the town of Gossi, Mali, according to Burkinabe authorities.
"We are sending teams there to verify where the plane crashed," Gilbert Diendere, Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore's chief of staff for military affairs, said at a press conference today. "We have contacted the authorities of Mali."
The loss of the plane over Africa follows the downing of a Malaysian Air Boeing Co. 777 wide-body over eastern Ukraine on July 17 following a suspected missile strike, killing all 298 people on board. Yesterday, an ATR-72 turbo-prop crash on the Penghu Islands in Taiwan left 48 people dead.
Fifty French citizens were aboard the Air Algerie plane and 24 people from Burkina Faso, Transport Minister Jean Bertin Ouedraogo told reporters in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso. Other passengers include eight people from Lebanon, six Algerians, five Canadians and four Germans, Swiftair said. Two citizens of Luxembourg were also on board, according to the country's Foreign Ministry.
Vast Area
The French and Algerian military are searching for the missing plane in a "vast" region in Mali, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius says at a press conference in Paris. The French forces are deploying 2 Mirage fighter jets to aid the hunt, he said.
"No trace of the plane has been found, it is probably lost," Fabius said. "If this tragedy is confirmed it would be a major one, hitting our nation and many others."
The aircraft asked the control tower in Niamey, Niger, to divert because of a storm about 40 minutes after taking off, Ouedraogo said, without saying where he got the information. According to AccuWeather meteorologist Anthony Sagliani, thunderstorms in the region were not particularly violent.
"In general, there were scattered showers and thunderstorms across all of Burkina Faso and the southern half of Mali," he said in in a statement. "This was with the monsoon trough which is typically found here in late July. So this activity was quite normal."
Sahel Zone
Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali share a border in the southern Sahel, a semi-arid zone below the Sahara desert that is sparsely populated and with few roads. The Sahel stretches more than 5,400 kilometers across Africa from Senegal in the west to Sudan in the east.
Algeria borders Niger and northern Mali, where Islamist militants and ethnic Tuareg separatists operate. Mali's government is in peace talks with Tuareg separatists after two years of sporadic fighting. French President Francois Hollande sent troops in 2013 to quash an invasion by Islamist militants trying to enter Bamako, the capital.
Algeria's transport minister is slated to hold a briefing at the airport later today. The country's Prime Minister Abdelmalekk Sellal said on state radio that the Algiers airport is in a state of crisis.
Sketchy Record
MD-83 planes belong to a family of twin-engine, short- to medium-range, single-aisle commercial airliners that were introduced in 1980. They were built by McDonnell Douglas Corp., acquired by Boeing Co. in 1997. Boeing had no immediate comment. The Swiftair MD-83 was built in 1996 and equipped with two Pratt & Whitney JT8D-219 PW engines.
Other incidents involving the model include the loss of an Alaska Airlines flight over the Pacific ocean in 2000, caused by inadequate maintenance, which killed all 88 people on board. In 2012, a Dana Airlines flight from the Nigerian capital, Abuja, crashed into the heavily populated Agege suburb of Lagos killing 153 people on board and 10 on the ground.
Swiftair, a private company created in 1986, has more than 400 employees and has a fleet of more than 30 planes, which include models such as the Boeing 727 and 737, MD-83, ATR-72/-42, Embraer 120 and Metroliner, according to its website. Customers listed on the site include Fedex Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc., and the 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 recent accident happened in 2003, when 102 passengers and crew were killed on a Boeing 737, according to the network. The plane stalled on a flight to Algiers and crashed into rocky terrain beyond the runway, ASN said.
While only one western-built jet hull was lost in Africa last year, the continent's safety record is still worse than anywhere else in the world, according to the International Air Transport Organization. There were 7.45 accidents per million in Africa in 2013, compared with a global rate of once accident for every 2.4 million flights, IATA said in April.
–With assistance from Charles Penty in Madrid, Simon Gongo in Ouagadougou, Andrea Rothman in Toulouse and Tarek El-Tablawy in Cairo.
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