There were few clear indications of what might have happened to the aircraft, or whether there were casualties, but Burkina Faso Transport Minister Jean Bertin Ouedrago said it asked to change route at 0138 GMT because of a storm in the area.
"I can confirm that it has crashed," the Algerian official told Reuters, declining to be identified or give any details about what had happened to the aircraft on its way north.
Almost half of the passengers were French citizens, an airline official said.
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 AH 5017 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 plane's fate.
Swiftair, the private Spanish company that owns the plane, confirmed it had lost contact with the MD-83 operated by Air Algerie, which it said was carrying 110 passengers and six crew.
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.
Whatever the cause, another plane crash is likely to add to nerves in the 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 canceled 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.
What could have happened to Air Algerie's flight from Ouagadougou to Algiers? Here are five possible scenarios.
1. Plane ran out of fuel - being reported by some Algerian media. In my opinion unlikely. At only 50 minutes into a four-hour flight, this would be a dramatic miscalculation.
2. Shot down by rebels. Possible, but still in the unlikely category. The Federal Aviation Administration issued this yesterday: "The US agency banned all flights into the territory and airspace of Mali saying the security situation remains fragile."
3. Hijacked. Air Algerie flights have been hijacked on at least six occasions I can find, but there have been no reports of demands being made before the plane crashed.
4. Weather. A source tells me that air traffic control asked the aircraft to divert near the Algerian border because of bad weather and to avoid another aircraft. It is now clear that there was a storm over Mali but I assume it did not collide with the other aircraft otherwise we would have reports of a second missing plane.
5. CCTV reporting it came down in Niger. This would have meant a considerable diversion to the east.
No comments:
Post a Comment