Air Algerie has lost contact with one of its passenger planes shortly after it took off from Burkina Faso en route to Algiers.
A company source said the missing aircraft had around 116 people of various nationalities on board.
An Air Algerie representative said there were 50 French passengers on board the flight.
Earlier, France’s transport minister Frederic Cuvillier said, “There were likely French people on board, and if there were French people on board there were certainly many of them.”
The company 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.
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 Thursday flying from Ouagadougou to Algiers, 50 minutes after takeoff,” the statement said.
The plane was carrying 110 passengers and six crew members.
The airline said the company had initiated an “emergency plan” in the search for flight AH5017.
The plane flies the four-hour passenger route four times a week.
There are conflicting reports on the make of the aircraft with a company source saying it is a DC-9, but an Algerian official has said it is an Airbus A320.
Authorities in Burkina Faso have set up a crisis unit in Ouagadougou airport to provide information to families of people on the flight.
A diplomat in the Malian capital Bamako said that the north of the country, which lies on the plane’s likely flight path, was struck by a powerful sandstorm overnight.
Head of Mali’s National Civil Aviation Agency, Issa Saly Maiga said that a search was under way for the missing flight.
“We do not know if the plane is in Malian territory,” he told Reuters news agency.
“Aviation authorities are mobilised in all the countries concerned – Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Algeria and even Spain,” he said.
One of Algeria’s worst air disasters happened in February this year, when a 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.