The Taiwanese plane that went down in the storm yesterday was a turbo-prop ATR 72. Today it was a (fairly ancient) MD-83 (or DC-10, source not clear). Mali is partly islamist territory and they may have the resources to blow up the plane. Else it just collided into mountains. Either way we will know soon enough.
……
Air
Algerie said it lost contact with one of its passenger aircraft nearly
an hour after take-off from Burkina Faso on Thursday bound for Algiers.
A company source told AFP that the missing aircraft was a DC-10 (other reports say MD-83) and that
some 110 passengers of various nationalities and six crew members are
listed as being on board the flight.
……
The source said contact with the flight was lost while it was still in Malian airspace approaching the border with Algeria.
“The plane was not far from the Algerian frontier when the crew was
asked to make a detour because of poor visibility and to prevent the
risk of collision with another aircraft on the Algiers-Bamako route,”
the source said.
“Contact was lost after the change of course.”
The airline announced that the plane had gone missing in a brief
statement carried by national news agency APS.
“Air navigation
services have lost contact with an Air Algerie plane on Thursday flying
from Ouagadougou to Algiers, 50 minutes after take-off,” the statement
said.
It added that the company initiated an “emergency plan”
in the search for flight AH5017, which flies the four-hour passenger
route four times a week.
One of Algeria’s worst air disasters
occurred in February this year, when a C-130 military aircraft carrying
78 people crashed in the mountainous northeast, killing more than 70
people.
Tamanrasset in the deep south was the site of the country’s worst ever civilian air disaster, in March 2003. In that accident, all but one of 103 people on board were killed when
an Air Algerie passenger plane crashed on take-off after one of its
engines caught fire
….
The domestic flight crashed near Magong airport on the outlying Penghu island, reports said.
There were a total of 54 passengers and four crew on board, Taiwan’s CNA news agency reported.
Aviation officials said flight GE222 aborted its initial landing and then crashed, local media reported.
Transport minister Yeh Kuang-Shih said that 47 people were killed and 11 were injured, CNA reported. The agency previously said that 51 were feared killed, citing fire department officials.
“It was thunderstorm conditions during the crash,” said Hsi Wen-guang, Penghu County Government Fire Bureau spokesman. “From the crash site we sent 11 people to hospital with
injuries. A few empty apartment buildings adjacent to the runway caught
fire, but no-one was inside at the time and the fire was extinguished.”
The ATR 72 turboprop aircraft departed from the southern
municipality of Kaohsiung at 17:43 local time (09:43 GMT), but lost
contact with controllers at 19:06, CNA said, citing the Civil
Aeronautics Administration.
The plane was found at Penghu island’s Xixi village in flames, local media reported.
Earlier on Wednesday, Taiwan was battered by strong winds and rain from a tropical storm, Typhoon Matmo. However, an official at the Civil Aeronautics Administration
told Reuters that bad weather at the time of the crash did not exceed
international regulations for landing.
Typhoon Matmo had caused many flights to be cancelled but the
land warning was lifted around 17:30 local time, around the time the
plane took off, the BBC’s Cindy Sui in Taipei reports.
…..
Link (1): http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28460625
Link (2): http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28448763
…..
regards