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Algerian airline ’loses contact’ with plane carrying 116 people after it disappears off radar while flying from Burkina Faso to Algiers

•     Passenger jet vanished 50 minutes after take-off from capital of Burkina Faso
•     Flight AH5017 should have landed in Algerian capital at around 5am GMT
•     Plane ’made detour due to poor visibility near Algerian border with Mali’
•     Crew also worried it may collide with another aircraft, airline source said

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Algeria’s national airline says it has lost contact with a plane carrying 110 passengers and six crew after it disappeared off the radar on a flight from Burkina Faso to Algiers.

Air Algerie said air navigation services lost track of the flight around 50 minutes after take-off.

The plane, which is owned by Spanish private company Swiftair, was last picked up on radar at 1.55am GMT, the official Algerian news agency said.

The flight should have landed in the Algerian capital at 5am GMT.

Conflicting reports said the aircraft was an airbus A320 or a McDonnell Douglas MD-83.

The flight path of AH5017 from Ouagadougou, the capital of the west African nation of Burkina Faso, to Algiers was not immediately clear.

A source from Air Algerie told the AFP news agency said contact was lost while it was still in Malian air space approaching the border with Algeria.

Fateful path: Contact was lost with flight AH 5017 while it was still in Malian air space approaching the border with Algeria after taking off from Ouagadougou, the capital of the west African nation of Burkina Faso

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 takeoff after one of its engines caught fire.

The sole survivor, a young Algerian soldier, was critically injured.

The incident comes a week after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

Concerns were first raised about the plane when it disappeared from radar screens while passing over the city of Donetsk last Thursday.

The plane was travelling at 33,000 feet on a pre-determined flight path when it suddenly vanished from trackers, immediately notifying air traffic controllers of the prospect that the plane had either crashed or made an emergency landing.

Flight radars generally monitor moving objects only, so if an aircraft disappears from the screens it either means the plane has become stationary or there has been a fault with the tracking system.

Tragically in the case of MH17 the former was true - but it wasn’t until body parts and plane wreckage were spotted scattered over an eight square-mile area in eastern Ukraine that a crash could be officially confirmed.

In the case of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, the latter was the true, where it is believed the radar transponder system was deliberately turned off by someone on board.

That plane is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean, killing all 239 people on board, but the wreckage has never been found and the cause of the disaster is unknown.