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you are just joining us, welcome to our live coverage of the
disappearance of an Air Algerie jet over the Sahara, with 116 people
aboard, many of them French citizens.
Flight AH5017 updates: Missing Algeria plane
Key Points
- An Air Algerie airliner is believed to have crashed in the Sahara, en route from Burkina Faso to Algiers
- Flight AH5017 had 110 passengers on board, including some 50 French citizens, as well as six Spanish crew members
- The plane was chartered from Spain's Swiftair
- UN officials suggest the plane may have come down in north-eastern Mali in bad weather
- All times BST (GMT +1)
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16:56:Tim Robinson, editor in chief of the Royal Aeronautical Society's Aerospace magazine, seeks to put these rekindled fears of flying in perspective. If crashes were as frequent today as in the 1950s, some 50,000-200,000 people would be killed annually, he says in a tweet. Fewer than 300 people died in air crashes last year.
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16:49:Flight AH5017 disappeared a day after a passenger jet crashed in Taiwan with the loss of at least 48 lives and a week after 298 people perished when their airliner crashed in Ukraine's conflict zone, apparently downed by a missile. People have been taking to social media to express their anxiety over flying.
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16:47: Pablo Esparza, BBC MundoMariela Castro, daughter of Cuba's President Raul Castro, talks live to Venezuela's Telesur TV: "I'm alive, happy and healthy... Maybe the media that published that news needed a bit of publicity but here I am."
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16:39:If you are just joining us, welcome to our live coverage of the disappearance of an Air Algerie jet over the Sahara, with 116 people aboard, many of them French citizens. No trace of the plane has been found amid fears that it crashed in bad weather en route from Burkina Faso to Algiers.
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16:29: Pablo Esparza, BBC MundoSources from the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX), where Mariela Castro is the director, said to BBC Mundo that she is taking part in an event in Havana.
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16:25:Ougadougou airport says on its website that Mariela Castro, daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro, is one of the passengers on the plane but the report has been denied.
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Michael van Poppel, BNO Newstweets: Hollande meeting with senior officials at presidential palace in Paris at 5 p.m. local following Air Algerie disappearance
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15:59:France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius says Air Algerie plane is still missing and has "probably" crashed.
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15:58:There are now known to be 51 French nationals on the missing plane.
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Siim Kallas, EU Vice President,tweets: Black week for aviation. Missing #FlightAH5017; we are following events closely.
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15:25:The two French fighter jets trying to locate the missing airline are tracing the flight's probable route, a French army spokesman tells Reuters.
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15:14:France's civil aviation body confirms its investigations into the missing aircraft are being run from Paris and Marseille.
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15:07:In an incident unrelated to Air Algerie, 77 people died in February this year when an Algerian military transport plane crashed into a mountain in the east of the country.
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15:04:Air Algerie's last major accident took place 11 years ago - a Boeing 737 crashed when one of its engines caught fire shortly after take-off from the southern city of Tamanrasset. The crash killed 102 people.
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14:43:Security sources in Niger say it has sent planes to fly over the border region with Mali to search for flight AH5017, Reuters reports.
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14:41:The scheduled route of flight AH5017 goes over Mali, which saw a military coup in 2012. Unrest involving both Ethnic Tuareg separatists and al-Qaeda-linked militants is continuing in the north of the country. However, a French official quoted by AP said it was unlikely that either party had access to weaponry that could shoot down a plane.
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14:31:The MD-83's two engines are made by Pratt & Whitney. The last plane in the MD-80 family was produced in 1999 but more than 400 remain in use worldwide, many of them in the US.
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14:28:A Boeing spokesman says the company is "aware" of reports of the missing aircraft is "awaiting additional information", Reuters reports.
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14:14: Real Madrid Infotweets: The plane #AH5017 that disappeared today was used by the Real Madrid between 2007 & 2009 known as "La Saeta"[@Marca]
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14:07:An Air Algerie official says the missing aircraft has crashed, Reuters reports. No details were given.
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14:02:Air Algerie says the aircraft's passenger list includes 50 people from France, 24 from Burkinabe, eight from Lebanon, four from Algeria and two from Luxembourg; one Belgian, one Swiss, one Nigerian, one Cameroonian, one Ukrainian and one Romanian - Reuters.
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13:59:Algerians worried about loved ones on the flight can call an Air Algerie help line, 021 509491, Algeria's El Watan newspaper reports (in French).
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13:50:McDonnell Douglas merged with Boeing in 1997. The MD-83 is among four planes in the MD-80 family, the others being the MD-81, MD-82, and MD-88, Boeing says on its website.
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13:48:An archive photo of a French Mirage 2000 jet. France has dispatched two to search for traces of the airliner.
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13:43:All six members of the missing plane's crew are Spanish, Spanish daily El Pais confirms.
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13:39: Hugh, Oxfordemails: I took exactly this flight two days ago, coming back from a holiday with some French friends. Thankfully it was without incident - I just can't believe this has happened! Judging from that flight, the passengers will have mostly been French, but a few north and west Africans too. I believe I was the only Brit. Thankfully I'm returning from France by train as otherwise I might feel uneasy flying again! Sympathies obviously go to the victims' families, just terrible.
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13:36:"Although there were storms, it is normal for the region," aviation safety blogger Simon Proud points out. "This was a big one, but not atypical."
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13:28:A government crisis centre has been set up in France with a telephone number for families: +33 1 43 17 56 56, Le Figaro reports.
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13:27:The French military says it is sending two fighter jets based in the region to try to locate the missing plane - Reuters.
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13:22:More on the MD-83. Originally built by McDonnell Douglas, the aircraft first saw service in 1984. It is a twin rear-engined, short-medium-range airliner and a more powerful version of the MD-80 type, which itself was based on the earlier DC-9. It can hold 172 passengers and has a maximum range of 4,637km (2,881 miles).
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13:20: The Spain Reporttweets: Spanish airline pilots trade union SEPLA confirms to @thespainreport that 6 AH5017 crew members are Spanish
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13:17:Flight AH5017 should have landed in the Algerian capital just over seven hours ago. In Madrid, media crews are setting up outside the offices of Swiftair as news of its disappearance sinks in.
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13:10:Our news story has just been updated with a map showing what we currently know about the route of the missing aircraft.
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13:04:British aviation expert Chris Yates tells the BBC the age of the plane could be a factor in the incident. "The question being whether that aircraft was, if you will, beyond its sell-by date in so much as it was being operated in an area of the world where scant regard is given sometimes to the age of an aircraft in operation."
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13:04:Fifty French citizens on the passenger list of the missing flight - Air Algerie.
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13:01: Simon Proud, aviation safety blogger,tweets: Minimum recorded temperature was -75C, meaning clouds up to ~49,500ft. Far above cruising altitude. @eumetsat @thatjohn @RAeSTimR
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13:01: Abdourahman Dia, BBC News, Dakar:The pilot reportedly contacted air traffic control in Niamey, Niger, to change course because of a storm. Meanwhile, the authorities in Algiers say they do not rule out any hypothesis, including hijacking.
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13:00: Simon Proud, aviation safety blogger,tweets: Weather at time of #AH5017 loss. Storm on flightpath: Clouds all rising above 40,000ft @eumetsat @thatjohn @RAeSTimR
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12:56:"Swiftair" is the most popular term on Twitter in Spain right now, with "Air Algerie" close behind. On French Twitter, the hash tags AH5017 and AirAlgerie are trending as news comes in that there may be French citizens aboard this Spanish jet chartered by Algeria.
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12:53:French civil aviation officials are holding an emergency meeting over the missing aircraft, France's transport minister says - AFP.
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12:47:France's Figaro newspaper talks of several" French citizens being aboard Flight AH5017. It disappeared off the radar about 50 minutes into its flight from Ouagadougou to Algiers, it says, quoting Air Algerie.
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12:45:A stock image of a Swiftair MD-83 aircraft. The missing plane was 18 years old and one of five MD-83s owned by the Madrid-based airline, aviation website Flightglobal says.
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12:38: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, an unnamed Air Algerie company source tells AFP news agency.
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12:37:French Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier: "There were likely French people on board, and if there were French people on board, there were certainly many of them" - Reuters.
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12:37: Alex Duval Smith, BBC News, MaliFrench and UN troops in northern Mali say they understand the plane came down between the north-eastern towns of Gao and Tessalit. The Nigerian general commanding 1,200 UN troops in Timbuktu said work was only just beginning on trying to trace the aircraft. General Koko Essien told the BBC the area leading up to the Algerian border was vast and sparsely populated. Brigadier General Essien said the weather had been bad in the region overnight.
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12:30:France's transport minister says it is "likely" there were "many" French passengers on the flight - Reuters.
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12:29:The plane was chartered from Spain's Swiftair. In a statement on its website (in Spanish), Swiftair confirms it has lost contact with its MD-83 aircraft. The plane took off from Burkina Faso at 01:17 GMT and was supposed to have landed in Algiers at 05:10 GMT, it adds.
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12:24: Alex Duval Smith, BBC News, MaliContact is believed to have been lost between Gao and Tessalit in north-eastern Mali. The most probable scenario at the moment is that the plane came down in bad weather. Sandstorms in the desert would account for very poor visibility. However, it is possible that it was shot down as armed groups do operate in the area.
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12:20:The flight had 110 passengers and six crew on board. You can read more about the background to the flight in our news story.
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12:20:Good afternoon and welcome to our live coverage of events after Algeria's national airline, Air Algerie, lost contact with one of its planes flying from Burkina Faso to Algiers across the Sahara.
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