An Air Algerie jetliner with 116 people aboard vanished Thursday in a rainstorm over northern Mali, and the airline and French officials said it probably crashed.
A U.S. official speaking not for attribution because he was not authorized initially said one of the passengers was a dual U.S.-French citizen, but that proved not to be the case. The official later said the person had been listed on a flight manifest but did not board the plane.A search was underway for wreckage of the MD-83 aircraft in a remote region where separatist violence may hamper the hunt and investigation.It was the third major international aviation disaster in a week, following the downing of a Malaysian Boeing 777 over eastern Ukraine and the crash of a passenger plane off Taiwan.
The Air Algerie plane was owned by Spanish company Swiftair and leased by Air Algerie. Flight 5017 disappeared from radar screens less than an hour after takeoff from Burkina Faso's capital of Ouagadougou en route to Algiers."Everything allows us to believe this plane crashed in Mali," French President Francois Hollande said after an emergency meeting in Paris. He said the crew changed its flight path because of "particularly difficult weather conditions."Earlier, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters the plane "probably crashed" and no "trace of the aircraft has been found."
The airline said on its Twitter account that the plane went down about 40 miles from the Malian city of Gao.Before vanishing, the pilots sent a final message to ask Niger air control to change its route because of heavy rain, Burkina Faso Transport Minister Jean Bertin Ouedraogo said.AccuWeather meteorologist Anthony Sagliani said the thunderstorms were not particularly violent."In general, there were scattered showers and thunderstorms across all of Burkina Faso and the southern half of Mali," Sagliani said. "This was with the monsoon trough, which is typically found here in late July. So this activity was quite normal."
The airline confirmed on Twitter that 50 of the passengers are French citizens. The six-person crew — including the two pilots — are Spanish, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reports.Also among the passengers are 24 citizens of Burkina Faso, eight Lebanese, six Algerians, five Canadians and four Germans, Air Algerie said.Ouagadougou, the capital of the west African nation of Burkina Faso, is in a nearly straight line south of Algiers, passing over Mali where unrest continues in the north.The deserts and mountains of northern Mali fell under control of ethnic Tuareg separatists and then al-Qaeda-linked Islamic extremists after a military coup in 2012. A French-led intervention scattered the extremists, but the Tuaregs have pushed back against the authority of the Bamako-based government.
However, a senior French official said it was unlikely that fighters in Mali had weaponry that could shoot down a plane, the Associated Press reports. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak for attribution, said the fighters have shoulder-fired weapons that could not hit an aircraft at cruising altitude.Though crashes of commercial passenger planes have become rare, it's not unprecedented for them to occur within a short time period.
(c)usatoday
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