South African Airways

A South African Airways jumbo jet with 160 people aboard plunged into the Indian Ocean off the island of Mauritius on Saturday shortly after the pilot reported smoke in the cockpit, officials said. Search planes reported no sign of survivors. The Boeing 747 bound for Johannesburg crashed 175 miles northeast of Mauritius 10 minutes before it was scheduled to land in the island nation off the southeast coast of Africa after a 5,000-mile flight from Taiwan. The passengers came from 11 countries.

Los Angeles City Councilman Robert Farrell will call on his colleagues to condemn the Century Plaza Hotel for allowing South Africa's tourism board and largest airline to hold a trade show there next month and will ask elected officials to stop patronizing the hotel in protest, officials said Thursday. Farrell plans to introduce the motion today, less than three weeks before South African Airways and the South African Tourism Board are scheduled to hold a cocktail reception and trade show Sept.

Airline and regulatory officials on both sides of the Atlantic had much more warning than previously known about the threat of a bomb like the one that blew a Pan Am jumbo jet out of the skies over Scotland last December, it was revealed here Thursday.

The Senate will pass a measure later this week aimed at forcing stiff economic sanctions against South Africa unless President Reagan's speech today contains "some new credible initiative" to fight apartheid, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) warned Reagan at a White House meeting Monday. Meanwhile, the symbolic centerpiece of Reagan's revamped policy toward South Africa collapsed, as North Carolina businessman Robert J.

Los Angeles City Councilman Robert Farrell introduced a motion Friday asking his colleagues to condemn the Century Plaza Hotel for allowing a trade show promoting tourism in South Africa to be held there, but stopped short of calling for an all-out boycott of the facility. "I believe this is an affront to us in the community . . . it runs counter to the spirit hundreds of thousands of people showed during the recent visit of Winnie and Nelson Mandela," said Farrell.

A South African Airways Boeing 737 jet bound for Cape Town had to turn back to Johannesburg's Jan Smuts Aiport last week after passengers spotted fuel gushing from a wing, the airline said on Friday. South African Airways spokeswoman Aletta van Jaarsveld said that after the plane had landed safely, technicians found that a seal on a fuel tank cap had broken.

A South African Airways Boeing 747 bound for West Germany turned back to Johannesburg with an engine trailing flames, the airline said Wednesday. An engine duct ruptured just after the plane, carrying 80 passengers, took off for Frankfurt late Tuesday. No one was hurt.

Officials today ended rescue efforts for survivors of a South African Airways jumbo jet crash after the discovery of mutilated corpses indicated that none of the 159 people aboard could have survived. The search continued for the flight recorder and other wreckage of the Boeing 747, which went down in the Indian Ocean on Saturday .

In the first prosecution under a 1986 anti-apartheid law, an aviation company and its chairman pleaded guilty Wednesday to importing four jet engines that were owned by South African Airways. Air Ground Equipment Sales Inc. of West Babylon, N.Y., and its chairman, Robert Fessler, had been indicted Monday. The guilty pleas were part of an agreement with federal prosecutors, who said the case was the first prosecution under the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.

The veteran pilot of a South African Airways jumbo jet carrying 160 people that plunged into the Indian Ocean had a hobby: collecting stamps and letters recovered from aircraft that crashed. In an ironic twist to Saturday's crash, friends said Sunday that Capt. D. J. Uys, 49, had been planning to publish a book on his collection of such letters and stamps, known as "crash mail." Five bodies were recovered at the crash scene on Sunday.