"The passenger jet, Yemenia Flight 626, was en route from Yemen's capital Sanaa to Moroni, the capital of Comoros, when it crashed one hour before its destination, Yemenia Air officials told CNN.
Moroni is about 2900 kilometres south of Yemen, off the east coast of Africa.
The plane, reportedly an Airbus A330-200, left Paris Charles de Gaulle airport on Monday, travelling to Marseille and then Sanaa in Yemen before heading to Moroni, a Paris airport source told Agence France-Presse.
It had left Sanaa at 9.30pm local time for a four-and-a-half-hour flight to Moroni, the BBC reported.
The flight was due in Moroni at 2300 GMT on Monday, but disappeared from radar screens, the AFP airport source said.
A crisis task force was set up at Charles de Gaulle airport early Tuesday.
Ibrahim Kassim, a representative from regional air security body ASECNA, said the plane had probably come down five to 10 kilometres from the coast, and civilian and military boats had been mobilised to start searching.
"We think the crash is somewhere along its landing approach," Kassim told Reuters. "The weather is really not very favourable. The sea is very rough."
Interior Minister Hamid Bourhane told Reuters the army had sent small speedboats to an area between the village of Ntsaoueni and the airport.
A Comoran police source told Reuters: "We really have no sea rescue capabilities."
'154 people on board'
On board where 143 passengers, most of them Comoran, an Sanaa airport official told CNN. The plane also had 11 crew, with a total of 154 people on the flight.
A civil aviation official told the BBC that weather conditions there had not been good for several days.
A medical worker in the town of Mitsamiouli, on the main island Grande Comore, said he had been called to the hospital.
"They have just called me to come to the hospital. They said a plane had crashed," he told The Guardian.
The Comoros covers three small volcanic islands, Grande Comore, Anjouan and Moheli, in the Mozambique channel, 300 kilometres north-west of Madagascar and a similar distance east of the African mainland.
Vice-president Idi Nadhoim, speaking from the airport at the main island's capital Moroni, told the BBC the accident happened early today.
The airline, which is 51
per cent owned by the Yemeni government and 49
per cent owned by the Saudi Arabian government, flies to Moroni, according to flight schedules on its website.
Its fleet includes two Airbus 330-200s, four Airbus 310-300s and four Boeing 737-800s, according to the site.
Yemenia flies to 23 destinations in Asia, Africa and Europe, and has a "good reputation in service and safety", the website stated"
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