At least 10 people, including the pilot, were injured when a Boeing passenger plane overran the runway while aborting takeoff from Senegal’s international airport outside Dakar on Thursday, the country’s transport minister said.
Air Senegal Flight HC301, operated by Transair, was carrying 79 passengers, two pilots and four cabin crew on an early morning flight from Blaise Diagne International Airport to Bamako, Mali, when it skidded off the runway, Malick said. Ndiaye, minister of infrastructure and land and air transport, said in a statement posted on social media.
Emergency services were deployed to evacuate passengers and the injured received medical attention, Ndiaye said.
Social media images published by The Associated Press showed passengers going down emergency slides in the dark while one side of the plane was on fire. “Our plane just caught fire,” Cheick Siriman Sissoko, a Malian musical artist, wrote in a Facebook post, the AP reported. He could not be reached by phone later Thursday.
Ndiaye said the cause of the incident was under investigation.
Transair’s plane, a Boeing 737-300, was an older model manufactured in 1994. Boeing, which has come under intense scrutiny after a series of accidents and malfunctions involving newer versions of the 737, referred questions about the incident in Senegal to Transair.
“Airlines operate and maintain their aircraft for more than 30 to 40 years,” Boeing said in an emailed statement.
Transair, which posted the minister’s statement on its Facebook page, did not respond to an email on Thursday. Air Senegal had not issued any statement regarding the incident.
The airport, which is more than an hour’s drive from the center of the capital Dakar, opened in 2017. It temporarily closed on Thursday morning before resuming operations in the afternoon.