1974 Air Mali crash in Upper Volta

The 1974 Air Mali crash in Upper Volta occurred on 11 August 1974. On that day, an Air Mali Ilyushin Il-18W, which was on a Hajj charter flight from Bamako to Jeddah via Kano, ran out of fuel because of a diversion of the flight and navigation errors. In the subsequent emergency landing near Linoghin in Upper Volta, present-day Burkina Faso, 47 of the 60 occupants of the aircraft died.

Accident sequence

The aircraft, which took off in Bamako, was to operate a flight to Jeddah with a stopover in Kano; on the return flight, the aircraft was to fly via Khartoum and Kano. It was a charter flight that was operated monthly.

On the flight from Bamako to Kano, the crew was informed by air traffic control that the weather conditions were steadily deteriorating. Air traffic control instructed the pilots to turn back to Niamey. In doing so, the pilots made a navigation error, so that they inadvertently flew the aircraft westwards and eventually reached Ouagadougou, the capital of Upper Volta, located 400 kilometres southwest of Niamey. Shortly afterwards, the aircraft ran out of fuel. The pilots then attempted to carry out an emergency landing near the village of Linoghin, located 40 kilometres east of the capital, which resulted in a crash landing. Two crew members and eleven passengers survived the accident; the remaining 47 occupants of the aircraft lost their lives.