Yet another  tragedy has hit the aviation world. And alarmingly, it is the third airplane crash in a mere eight days. This calamity comes a week after a  Flight MH17 of Malaysia Airlines was shot down over Ukraine, and just a day after Flight GE222 of TransAsia Airways crashed off Taiwan during monsoon season on Wednesday.

Flight AH5017 of Air Algérie took off from the West African country of Burkina Faso shortly after midnight on Thusday, July 24, 2014.

Severe storms were reported by the pilot. Then, only 50 minutes after take-off, contact with Flight AH 5017 was lost as it flew over the Sahara. Headed for Algiers, Flight AH5017, along with its 116 passengers, crashed approximately two hours later.

The plane’s devastating fate touched many countries. 54 French nationals constituted the majority of passengers, while Burkina Faso lost 27 passengers. Lebanon lost 8, Algeria 6, Canada 5, Spain 6, and Germany 4. Meanwhile Belgium, Egypt, Ukraine, Switzerland, Nigeria, Mali, and the UK all only lost 1 passenger each.

France, as it already had troops in Mali due to an Al Qaeda scare in 2013, sent military to recover the remains. The French forces who secured the site in Mali found one flight recorder but no survivors.

And the cause of the crash appears to be weather related, though nothing is ruled out at this point. French President Francoise Hollande stated, “It is still too early to draw any conclusions, they will come in time. There are hypotheses, including weather conditions, but we are not putting any of them aside because we want to find out everything that happened.”

France is now on the global stage as it analyzes the data from the black box, and as the French military continues to find debris from the wreckage.