An Air Algerie flight has crashed en route from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Algiers with 110 passengers up to speed, almost 50% of them French citizens, officials say. An Algerian official told Reuters the plane had crashed en rout to Algiers, but declined to offer information on where the plane was or what caused the accident. Burkino Faso's transport minister Jean Bertin Ouedrago said the aircraft asked to change route on Thursday at 1:38am GMT (11:38am AEST) as a result of storm in the area.
Continue...Two French fighter jets based in the region have been dispatched to try to locate the airliner along its probable route, a French army spokesman said.
Niger security sources said planes were flying over the border region with Mali to search for the flight.
Algeria's state news agency APS said authorities lost contact with flight AH5017 an hour after it took off from Burkina Faso, but other officials gave differing accounts of the times of contact, adding to confusion about the fate of the flight and where it might be.
Swiftair, the private Spanish company that owns the aircraft, confirmed it had lost contact with the MD-83 operated by Air Algerie, which it said was carrying 110 passengers and six crew.
Whatever its fate, the loss of contact is likely to add to nerves in the airline industry after a Malaysia Airlines plane was downed over Ukraine last week, a TransAsia Airways crashed off Taiwan during a thunderstorm on Wednesday and airlines cancelled flights into Tel Aviv due to the conflict in Gaza.
An Air Algerie representative in Burkina Faso, Kara Terki, told a news conference that all the passengers on the plane were in transit, either for Europe, the Middle East or Canada.
He said the passenger list included 50 French, 24 Burkinabe, eight Lebanese, four Algerians, two from Luxembourg, one Belgian, one Swiss, one Nigerian, one Cameroonian, one Ukrainian and one Romanian.
Lebanese officials said there were at least 10 Lebanese citizens on the flight.
A spokeswoman for SEPLA, Spain's pilots union, said the six crew were from Spain. She could not give any further details.
Search underway in Mali
Swiftair said on its website the aircraft took off from Burkina Faso on Thursday at 1:17am GMT (11:17am AEST) and was supposed to land in Algiers at 5:10am GMT (3:10pm AEST) the same day but never reached its destination.
An Algerian aviation official said the last contact Algerian authorities had with the aircraft was at 1:55am GMT (11:55am AEST) on Thursday when it was flying over Gao, Mali.
Aviation authorities in Burkina say they handed the flight to the control tower in Niamey, Niger, at 1:38am GMT (11:38am AEST). They said the last contact with the flight was just after 3:30am GMT (1:30pm AEST) Thursday.
Mr Ouedrago said the flight asked the control tower in Niamey to change route because of a storm in the Sahara.
However, a source in the control tower in Niamey, who declined to be identified, said it had not been contacted by the plane, which in theory should have flown over Mali.
Burkinabe authorities have set up a crisis unit in Ouagadougou airport to provide information to families of people on the flight.
A diplomat in the Malian capital Bamako said that the north of the country - which lies on the plane's likely flight path - was struck by a powerful sandstorm overnight.
Issa Saly Maiga, head of Mali's National Civil Aviation Agency, said that a search was under way for the missing flight.
"We do not know if the plane is Malian territory," he told Reuters.
"Aviation authorities are mobilised in all the countries concerned - Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Algeria and even Spain."
Aviation websites said the missing aircraft, one of four MD-83s owned by Swiftair, was 18 years old.
The aircraft's two engines are made by Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies.
US plane maker McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing , stopped producing the MD-80 airliner family in 1999 but it remains in widespread use.
According to British consultancy Flightglobal Ascend, there are 482 MD-80 aircraft in operation, many of them in the United States.
"Boeing is aware of the report (on the missing aircraft). We are awaiting additional information," a spokesman for the plane maker said.
Swiftair has a relatively clean safety record, with five accidents since 1977, two of which caused a total of eight deaths, according to the Washington-based Flight Safety Foundation.
Air Algerie's last major accident was in 2003 when one of its planes crashed shortly after take-off from the southern city of Tamanrasset, killing 102 people.
In February this year, 77 people died when an Algerian military transport plane crashed into a mountain in eastern Algeria.
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