A French military unit was dispatched Friday to northern Mali to assess the site where an Air Algerie plane crashed Thursday, killing all 116 people on board.

While France's interior minister said Friday that terrorism is not being ruled out, the plane most likely crashed because of turbulent weather, The Associated Press reports.

The MD-83 aircraft, owned by Spanish company Swiftair and leased by Algeria's flagship carrier, disappeared from radar less than an hour after takeoff. The plan took off from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso's capital, for Algiers. The plane was going to change its course because of the weather.

French President Francois Hollande said Friday that one of the plane's two black boxes was found in the debris, and it will be taken to Gao, a city in northern Mali.

Thirty soldiers were dispatched to the crash site, which is in a concentrated area.

Hollande's office released a statement early Friday that said the aircraft had been identified, "despite its state of disintegration."

The transport minister said that discovering the wreckage quickly is important to figure out exactly what happened.

"We think the plane went down due to weather conditions, but no hypothesis can be excluded as long as we don't have the results of an investigation," French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told RTL radio, according to The Associated Press.

"Terrorist groups are in the zone. ... We know these groups are hostile to Western interests," Cazeneuve said.

The pilots sent a message to ask Niger air control to change its course because of heavy rain.

Almost half of the passengers aboard the plane were French. The president promised to send in the French military and call on regional partners for assistance. French officials said the crash site is in the Gossi region of Mali, which borders Burkina Faso.

"We sent men, with the agreement of the Mali government, to the site, and they found the wreckage of the plane with the help of the inhabitants of the area," said Gen. Gilbert Diendere, an aide to Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore, according to AP.

French forces searched for the flight with Algerian officials, as did the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali, which is called MINUSMA. Algerian aircraft also hunted for the missing plane.

Swifair, a private Spanish airline, left Burkina Faso at 0117 Thursday.

The passengers on board were mostly French with 51 French aboard, 27 Burkina Faso nationals, eight Lebanese, six Algerians, five Canadians, four Germans, two Luxembourg nationals, one Belgian, one Swiss, one Ukrainian, one Egyptian, one Nigerian, one Cameroonian and one Malian. Six of the crew members were Spanish.

A French soldier was killed earlier in July near the town of Gao, where French troops remain after they invaded Mali in January 2013 to drive out Islamist jihadists. Separatist Touaregs have been fighting each other in the region as well.

The crash was the third major airline tragedy in one week, sending shock waves around the world.

A Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down over east Ukraine by pro-Russia separatists last week. The separatists fired an allegedly Russian-made surface-to-air missile. Then on Wednesday, an airplane from Taiwan crashed during a storm, killing all 48 people on board.