Crashed Air Algerie plane was ‘old and rotten’

The plane which crashed in the Sahara Desert with the loss of 118 lives was described as “old and rotten” by a passenger just a fortnight ago.

A French-Algerian student named only as Fares, who is in his 20s, posted a video on YouTube attacking Air Algerie, which had chartered the plane from Spanish firm Swiftair.

Not only was the McDonnell Douglas MD-83 18 years old, but many considered it to be obsolete as far as transporting ordinary members of the public is concerned.

There were 54 French deaths in the tragedy, including 10 members of a single family, and five members of another.

It came as the first pictures of the “disintegrated wreckage” of Flight AH5017 were released.
It was found by a French Army MQ9 Reaper drone bought from the US to hunt down Al-Qaeda terrorists in Mali’s portion of the Sahara Desert.

Fares was on board the plane on July 9, when the same plane flew from Paris to Batna – a distance of some 1,500 miles.

In the video he said: “It’s an old rotten plane which can barely reach the airport terminals,” adding: “Air Algerie makes us travel in a plane without a logo, the crew speaks Spanish and they tell us nothing.”

At the end of the complaint, Fares added: ‘Please Air Algerie – do your job, we pay a fortune for your tickets.”

Both Swiftair and Air Algerie have insisted that the plane was in “good condition” and flightworthy. Mechanical failures are high on the list of probable causes of the accident, which has been described as a “national tragedy” by French President Francois Hollande.

French troops have secured the crash site, in the region of Gossi, in north-eastern Mali.

While flight AH5017 changed direction due to bad weather, experts doubted a storm could have caused a crash.

There were 51 French nationals on board the plane, many of them expatriates on their way back to Paris and Marseille for the summer holidays.

The Spanish pilots union said the pilots and crew were Spanish, and Hollande said the aircraft carried passanger from 14 other nationalities.

Kara Terki, from Air Algerie, said these included 24 Burkinabe, eight Lebanese, four Algerians, two nationals of Luxembourg, one Belgian, one Swiss, one Nigerian, one Cameroonian, one Ukrainian and one Romanian. Bernard Reynaud, from Lorette, in the Loire department of France, died alongside his ex-wife, Michelle, who lived in Lyon. With them were their sons Franck and Eric, and their respective wives Laure and Estelle. The Reynaud’s grandchildren, Nathan, Julie, Alexi and Zoe were also killed.

All were on holiday in Burkina Faso, where they had friends in Ouagadougou – the country’s capital from where the flight took off on Thursday morning.

Also aboard were five member of the same family, including Bertrand Gineste, a 55-year-old chemist from the town of Gueret. Gineste and his wife Veronique, and their three children, aged between 14 and 19, were all members of a development organisation in Burkina Faso.

Jean-Jacques Dupre, a friend of Reynaud’s, said: “It’s difficult, very difficult, he was an exceptional friend. We worked together for 20 years, and we’ve been friends for 40, we studied together.”

Gineste employed 23 people at his Marche pharmacy in Gueret.