jetliner carrying 116 people crashed
Thursday in a rainstorm over restive
Mali, and its wreckage was found near
the border of neighboring Burkina Faso
— the third major international
aviation disaster in a week.
The plane, owned by Spanish company
Swiftair and leased by Algeria's
flagship carrier, disappeared from
radar less than an hour after it took off
from Burkina Faso's capital of
Ouagadougou for Algiers.
French fighter jets, U.N. peacekeepers
and others hunted for the wreckage of
the MD-83 in the remote region, where
scattered separatist violence may
hamper an eventual investigation into
what happened.
It was found about 50 kilometers (31
miles) from the border of Burkina Faso
near the village of Boulikessi in Mali, a
Burkina Faso presidential aide 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, a
close aide to Burkina Faso President
Blaise Compaore and 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.
He told The Associated Press that
rescuers went to the area after they had
heard from a resident that he saw the
plane go down 80 kilometers (50 miles)
southwest of Malian town of Gossi.
Burkina Faso's government spokesman
said the country will observe 48 hours
of mourning.
Malian state television also said the
debris of Flight 5017 was found in the
village of Boulikessi and was found by
a helicopter from Burkina Faso.
Algeria's transport minister also said
the wreckage had apparently been
found. French officials could not
confirm the discovery late Thursday.
"We found the plane by accident" near
Boulikessi, said Sidi Ould Brahim, a
Tuareg separatist who travelled from
Mali to a refugee camp for Malians in
Burkina Faso.
"The plane was burned, there were
traces of rain on the plane, and bodies
were torn apart," he told AP.
Families from France to Canada and
beyond had been waiting anxiously for
word about the jetliner and the fate of
their loved ones aboard. Nearly half of
the passengers were French, many en
route home from Africa.
"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."
French Foreign Minister Laurent
Fabius, his face drawn and voice
somber, told reporters, "If this
catastrophe is confirmed, it would be a
major tragedy that hits our entire
nation, and many others."
The pilots had sent a final message to
ask Niger air control to change its route
because of heavy rain, said Burkina
Faso Transport Minister Jean Bertin
Ouedraogo.
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, known as MINUSMA.
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, also known as MANPADS,
most airliners would normally fly out
of range of these shoulder-fired
weapons. They can hit targets flying up
to roughly 12,000-15,000 feet.
The crash of the Air Algerie plane is the
latest in a series of aviation disasters.
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, a Malaysia Airlines flight
was shot down while flying over a war-
torn section of Ukraine, and the U.S.
has blamed it on separatists firing a
surface-to-air missile.
Earlier this week, U.S. and European
airlines started canceling flights to Tel
Aviv after a rocket landed near the
city's airport. Finally, on Wednesday, a
Taiwanese plane crashed during a
storm, killing 48 people.
It's easy to see why fliers are jittery, but
air travel is relatively safe.
There have been two deaths for every
100 million passengers on commercial
flights in the last decade, excluding acts
of terrorism. Travelers are much more
likely to die driving to the airport than
stepping on a plane. 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 plane was carrying 110 passengers
and six crew, and left Burkina Faso for
Algiers at 0117 GMT Thursday (9:17
p.m. EDT Wednesday), but had not
arrived at the scheduled time of 0510
GMT (1:10 a.m. EDT Thursday). It said
the crew included two pilots and four
flight attendants.
The passengers included 51 French, 27
Burkina Faso nationals, eight
Lebanese, six Algerians, five
Canadians, four Germans, two
Luxembourg nationals, one Swiss, one
Belgian, one Egyptian, one Ukrainian,
one Nigerian, one Cameroonian and
one Malian, Ouedraogo said. The six
crew members were Spanish, according
to the Spanish pilots' union.
Swiftair said the plane was built in
1996, with 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 had more than 37,800
hours of flight time and has made more
than 32,100 takeoffs and landings.
It was the fifth crash — and the second
with fatalities — for Swiftair 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 MD-80s
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 being replacing the jets with
newer, fuel-efficient models such as
Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s.
There are 496 other MD-80s being
flown, according to Ascend
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