Boeing plane goes off runway in Senegal, leaving at least 10 injured

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 in the outskirts of Dakar on Thursday, the country’s transport minister said.

Air Senegal Flight HC301, which is 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 went off the runway, Malick Ndiaye, the minister of infrastructure and land and air transport, said in a statement posted on social media.

Emergency services were deployed to evacuate the passengers, and those who were injured were receiving medical care, Mr. Ndiaye said.

Footage from social media and published by The Associated Press, AP, showed passengers going down emergency slides in the dark as one side of the aircraft was in flames. “Our plane just caught fire,” wrote Cheick Siriman Sissoko, a musical artist from Mali, in a post on Facebook, The AP reported.

He could not be reached by telephone later on Thursday.

Mr. Ndiaye said the cause of the incident was under investigation.

The Transair 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.

“Carriers operate and maintain their airplanes for upwards of 30 to 40 years,” Boeing said in an emailed statement.

Transair, which posted the minister’s statement on its Facebook page, did not reply to an email on Thursday. Air Senegal had not issued a statement on the incident.

The airport, which is more than an hour’s drive from the center of the capital, Dakar, opened in 2017. It shut down temporarily on Thursday morning before resuming operations in the afternoon.