Missing Kenyan plane still untraced

Nairobi: An air search in Cameroon has so far failed to locate the whereabouts of a Kenya Airways plane which is thought to have crashed in the south of the country with 114 people on board.
The Kenya airways Boeing 737-800, on its way from Cameroon had crashed in a densely forest area just off the coast.
The flight, which originated in Ivory Coast, was reported missing on Saturday after it failed to arrive in Kenya. It was the announcement relatives gathered at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta International Airport had been dreading.
Twenty-three nationalities were among the 115 passengers on board, 15 of them are Indian.
Three persons from Kanpur are reportedly on board the flight. NDTV spoke to Shailesh Shukla whose sister Poornima and brother-in-law Anil Shukla were reportedly on the flight.
A distress signal it seems, originating from the plane's black box, is the only thing rescuers have to go on.
''The latest information that a distress signal was picked up on the west coast of Africa and a search and rescue mission initiated by Cameroonian authorities was initiated at 1105 (0805GMT) this morning, that is Nairobi time. So far no report has been received from this mission,'' said Titus Naikuni, MD, Kenya Airways.
Search operations that were suspended during the night due to poor weather, have now resumed.
All Kenya Airways can say is that its plane from the Cameroon has gone missing and all its 114 passengers are to be traced.
At the airport in Nairobi, it is an anxious wait but few seem hopeful of survivors, especially after the grim assessment on the ground.
We have a helicopter that is there right now, and one fixed wing aircraft. So far we have not spotted, or they have not spotted, the aircraft as yet. The dense Equatorial forest, the heavy rainfall, is not assisting in the search,'' said Titus Naikuni, CEO, Kenya Airways.
There were people of 23 nationalities on board so the Kenya Transport Minister is leading a team of Kenya Airways and government officials to Douala, the plane's last stop.
That's where Flight KQ 507 last communicated with control towers.
The Boeing 737-800 was said to be just six months old and part of a new fleet bought by the Kenya's national carrier.
''You know it is a sad thing, it is very sad remembering that we lost a number of people in 2002, and you know it was the same route,'' said Janet Mwema, mother of crewmember on flight.
And that's the mystery. Kenya Airways has always had a good track record. The last crash was seven years ago when a plane crashed off the Ivory Coast killing 169 people.
06/05/07 NDTV.com

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Categories: Foreign May 2007, Safety May 2007