Victoria Air Charter Under Contract To Maniema Union

A chartered Antonov An-12 went down in Africa Wednesday, killing all 26 people onboard, according to civil aviation authorities.

The chartered aircraft was headed from Goma, in the eastern part of the Congo, to Kindu, another town in the region, when it apparently crashed shortly after take-off.

"We can't say if there was a crash or a forced landing. These are things we don't know now," Raymond Sangara, a member of the Congolese Civil Aviation Authority, told the Associated Press.

Sangara said controllers lost contact with the aircraft approximately three minutes after it departed the airport at Goma. UN helicopters and a Congolese military search plane scoured the area for wreckage, but had found nothing by Wednesday night.

It was the third Antonov mishap in the Congo since December, 2003, according to news reports. As ANN reported in real time May 5th, an AN-26 went down in Central Congo, killing ten of the eleven people on board.

The Congo has a major transportation problem -- years of armed conflict have left the country's roads virtually impassable. Towns and even major cities have become isolated and the general population depends largely on rickety boats and questionable flying cast-offs from the former Soviet Union as transportation mainstays.

The fighting has continued to rock eastern Congo, although there were no reports of battles in the Goma area at the time of the most recent aviation mishap.

FMI: www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/cf.html