Plane missing in Venezuela with dozens aboard

CARACAS (Reuters) - A Venezuelan commercial plane carrying up to 46 people went missing on Thursday soon after taking off from an Andean mountain city just before dusk, authorities said.

The plane of the local airline Santa Barbara flew out of the high-altitude city of Merida headed for the capital Caracas and by late Thursday had been out of contact with air traffic controllers for hours, the civil aviation authority said.

Authorities had not identified the location of the plane in the mountainous area and were sending search and rescue teams to check its whereabouts, Civil Defense chief Antonio Rivero told reporters.

"This causes a lot of fear, a lot of pain," he said.

It was still not confirmed if the plane had crashed or was simply missing, he added.

The state capital, also named Merida, is 680 km (422 miles) southwest of Caracas and is a popular destination for foreign tourists seeking outdoor activities such as hiking.

The plane was an ATR 42-300, a turboprop plane built by French-Italian company ATR, the civil aviation authority said in a statement.

It is the second serious incident involving a Venezuelan passenger plane in the country this year.

In January, a plane carrying 14 people, including eight Italians and one Swiss passenger, crashed into the sea close to a group of islands.