Algeria jetliner vanishes; wreckage spotted in Mali

Plane carried 116; no survivors found

Journalists wait for news outside the Spanish Swiftair airline office in Madrid, Spain,Thursday, July 24, 2014. An Air Algerie flight carrying more than 100 people from Burkina Faso to Algeria's capital disappeared from radar early Thursday over northern Mali, officials said. France's foreign minister said no wreckage had been found, but that the plane "probably crashed." More than 50 French were onboard the plane along with 27 Burkina Faso nationals and passengers from a dozen other countries. The flight was being operated by Spanish airline Swiftair, the company said in a statement, and the plane belonged to Swiftair. The flight crew was Spanish. (AP Photo/Paul White)
Journalists wait for news outside the Spanish Swiftair airline office in Madrid, Spain,Thursday, July 24, 2014. An Air Algerie flight carrying more than 100 people from Burkina Faso to Algeria's capital disappeared from radar early Thursday over northern Mali, officials said. France's foreign minister said no wreckage had been found, but that the plane "probably crashed." More than 50 French were onboard the plane along with 27 Burkina Faso nationals and passengers from a dozen other countries. The flight was being operated by Spanish airline Swiftair, the company said in a statement, and the plane belonged to Swiftair. The flight crew was Spanish. (AP Photo/Paul White)

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso -- An Air Algerie jetliner carrying 116 people crashed early Thursday in a rainstorm over restive Mali, and its wreckage was found near the border of neighboring Burkina Faso, officials said.

The plane, owned by Spanish company Swiftair and leased by the Algerian carrier, disappeared from radar screens less than an hour after takeoff from Burkina Faso's capital, Ouagadougou, en route to Algiers.

French fighter jets, United Nations peacekeepers and others hunted for signs of wreckage of the MD-83 plane in the remote region, where scattered separatist violence has the potential to hamper an eventual investigation into what happened.

The wreckage was found about 31 miles from the border of Burkina Faso near the village of Boulikessi in Mali, a close aide to Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore said.

"We sent men with the agreement of the Mali government to the site and they found the wreckage of the plane with the help of the inhabitants of the area," said Gen. Gilbert Diendere, who is the head of the crisis committee set up to investigate the flight.

"They found human remains and the wreckage of the plane totally burnt and scattered," he said.

Burkina Faso's government spokesman said the country will observe 48 hours of mourning.

Diendere said rescuers went to the area after they had heard from a resident that he saw the plane go down 50 miles southwest of the Malian town of Gossi.

"We found no survivors," Diendere said. "Someone saw the plane fall and alerted us, so we sent a mission there that went to the spot. But we couldn't examine the wreck because night was falling." He said the wrecked plane would be examined today.

The general said the crash "must have been because of the weather -- there were a lot of storms, and there was lightning."

Malian state television also said the wreckage was found near the village of Boulikessi by a helicopter from Burkina Faso. Algeria's transport minister also said the plane's remains had apparently been found. But French officials said they could not immediately confirm the discovery.

Col. Gilles Jaron, a spokesman for the French army, which dispatched warplanes from a base in West Africa to search for the plane, said late Thursday that he could not confirm that any wreckage had been located. "We are continuing the search," he said.

Families from France to Canada and beyond had been waiting anxiously for signs of Flight 5017 and their loved ones aboard. Nearly half of the passengers were French, many on their way home from Africa.

"Everything allows us to believe this plane crashed in Mali," French President Francois Hollande said Thursday night after an emergency meeting in Paris. He said the crew changed its flight path because of "particularly difficult weather conditions."

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, his face drawn and voice somber, said, "If this catastrophe is confirmed, it would be a major tragedy that hits our entire nation, and many others."

Before vanishing, the pilots sent a final message to ask Niger air control to change its route because of rough weather, Burkina Faso Transport Minister Jean Bertin Ouedraogo said.

Residents of northern Mali reported a heavy sandstorm overnight. "There was a lot of damage from the wind, especially in the region of Kidal," said Kata Data Alhousseini Maiga, an official with the U.N. mission in Gao, Mali. "The sand was so thick that you couldn't see."

After the plane disappeared, French forces, who have been in Mali since January 2013 to rout al-Qaida-linked extremists who had controlled the north, searched for the plane, alongside the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali.

Algerian Transport Minister Omar Ghoul, whose country's planes were also searching for wreckage, described it as a "serious and delicate affair."

The vast deserts and mountains of northern Mali fell under control of ethnic Tuareg separatists and then al-Qaida-linked Islamic extremists after a military coup in 2012.

The French-led intervention scattered the extremists, but the Tuaregs have pushed back against the authority of the Bamako-based government. Meanwhile, the threat from Islamic militants hasn't disappeared, and France is giving its troops a new and larger anti-terrorist mission across the region.

A senior French official said it seems unlikely that fighters in Mali had the kind of weaponry that could shoot down a jetliner at cruising altitude. While al-Qaida's North Africa branch is believed to have an SA-7 surface-to-air missile, most airliners would normally fly out of the range of the shoulder-fired weapons. They can hit targets flying up to roughly 12,000-15,000 feet.

The crash of the Air Algerie plane happened after a series of aviation disasters in recent months.

Fliers around the globe have been on edge ever since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared in March on its way to Beijing. Searchers have yet to find a single piece of wreckage from the jet with 239 people on board.

Last week, another Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down while flying over a war-torn section of Ukraine. The U.S. has blamed that crash on pro-Russia rebels firing a surface-to-air missile. The separatists also have claimed responsibility for the downing of at least three Ukrainian military planes since last week.

On Wednesday, a Taiwanese plane crashed during a storm, killing 48 people and injuring at least 15 others.

But despite recent events, experts say air travel is relatively safe.

There have been two deaths for every 100 million passengers on commercial flights in the past decade, excluding acts of terrorism. Travelers are much more likely to die driving to the airport than stepping on a plane, experts say. There are more than 30,000 motor-vehicle deaths in the U.S. each year, a mortality rate eight times greater than that in planes.

Swiftair, a private Spanish airline, said the Air Algerie plane was carrying 110 passengers and six crew members and left Ouagadougou for Algiers around 1 a.m. Burkina Faso time, but had not arrived at its scheduled time. It said the crew included two pilots and four flight attendants.

The passengers included 51 French, 27 Burkina Faso residents, eight Lebanese, six Algerians, five Canadians, four Germans, two Luxembourg residents, one Swiss, one Belgian, one Egyptian, one Ukrainian, one Nigerian, one Cameroonian and one Malian, said Ouedraogo, the transport minister. The six crew members were from Spain, the Spanish pilots' union said.

Swiftair said the plane was built in 1996 and has two Pratt & Whitney JT8D-219 PW engines.

Swiftair took ownership of the plane on Oct. 24, 2012, after it spent nearly 10 months unused in storage, according to Flightglobal's Ascend Online Fleets, which sells and tracks information about aircraft. It has more than 37,800 hours of flight time and has made more than 32,100 takeoffs and landings.

Swiftair has had four previous crashes since its founding in 1986, according to the Flight Safety Foundation.

The MD-83 is part of a series of jets built since the early 1980s by McDonnell Douglas, a U.S. company now owned by Boeing Co. The jets are single-aisle planes that were a workhorse of the airline industry for short- and medium-range flights for nearly two decades. As jet fuel prices spiked in recent years, airlines have rapidly been replacing the jets with newer, fuel-efficient models such as Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s.

Boeing spokesman Wilson Chow said the company was aware of the reports on the plane and was "gathering more information."

Information for this article was contributed by Brahima Ouedraogo, Sylvie Corbet, Aomar Ouali, Karim Kebir, Baba Ahmed, Ciaran Giles, Elaine Ganley, Thomas Adamson, Sylvie Corbet and Edith M. Lederer of The Associated Press and by Adam Nossiter, Nicola Clark, Scott Sayare and Rukmini Callimachi of The New York Times.

A Section on 07/25/2014

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