An Air Algérie jetliner with 118 people on board lost contact with ground controllers on Thursday and likely crashed in northern Mali, the airline and French officials said, marking the latest in a string of airline incidents around the world that have mobilized aviation regulators and safety officials.

For the second time in a week, executives and air-safety regulators struggled to ascertain what happened. The jetliner, a Boeing Co. MD-83, took off from Burkina Faso en route to the Algerian capital, Algiers. If a crash is confirmed, authorities would then also have to grapple with the daunting task of retrieving wreckage and human remains from a desolate and tense conflict zone.

The fate of Air Algérie Flight 5017—which lost contact at 1:55 a.m. local time, 50 minutes after departing from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso—reverberated far beyond the Sahara, from where it was last heard. Fifty-one passengers on board were French nationals, many of them due to catch connecting flights in Algiers to return home to France.

French President François Hollande summoned senior members of his cabinet for a crisis meeting Thursday, deploying fighter jets and other military forces in the region to search for wreckage over northern Mali—a Texas-size area where authorities believe the plane went down.