Both countries have sent up aircraft to try to spot the plane, which disappeared during a flight from Yaounde to northwest Congo Republic on Saturday with eleven people on board.
“The search is difficult because it is taking place in a densely forested zone and the weather is not good, there are problems with visibility,” said Tamphile Akoli Awaya, police commissioner at Brazzaville airport. Australian mining magnate Ken Talbot, one of Australia’s richest men, and five other executives from three Australian mining firms — Gindalbie, Sundance Resources, and Western Areas — were on the CASA C212 prop plane when it disappeared.
Talbot is a director of Perth-based Sundance, which is trying to develop the big Mbalam iron ore mine straddling Cameroon and Congo, and his own company Talbot Group is a major shareholder. Sundance plans to bring the Mbalam iron ore project into production in 2012.
Chairman of Gindalbie and Sundance, Geoff Wedlock, and chief financial officer of nickel miner Western Areas, Craig Oliver, were among the missing mining executives. Sundance Resources asked the Australian Stock Exchange to suspend its shares on Monday, and investment bank Renaissance Capital downgraded the company from buy to hold.
“When Sundance begins to trade again there could be a significant markdown in value to reflect the uncertainty of the current situation,” the bank said in a research note. Cameroon’s government said that aside from the six Australians, there were also two Britons, two French nationals and one American on the aircraft.
“All possible means are being mobilized to continue the search, but it will likely take some time because the aircraft got missing over vast and thick forest,” said Cameroon Information Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary.
“It is like searching for a needle in the forest.” It took two days for searchers to find a Kenya Airways Boeing 737 that crashed in Cameroon in 2007.
Aviation officials lost contact with the plane on Saturday about an hour after it took off from Yaounde en route to Yangadou in the northwest of Congo Republic.
Private aircraft are widely used by international companies operating in central Africa, where dense tropical forest and the lack of public flight connections make travel otherwise next to impossible.
Yet even with well-maintained private jets the state of local airstrips can make air travel dangerous.
Last September a plane carrying the South African delegation back from a summit in Libya had to make an emergency landing on an unlit airstrip in northern Democratic Republic of Congo after missing a fuel stop because of bad weather.
However a number of countries are looking to revamp their air infrastructure, with Congo Republic announcing last December it had handed over management control of three of its airports to Deutsche Lufthansa for 25 years in a bid to turn them into a regional hub.
