Gone missing

The BBC reports on another missing airliner:

Algeria's national airline, Air Algerie, says it has lost contact with one of its planes flying from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, to Algiers, the capital of Algeria, across the Sahara. Contact was lost about fifty minutes after take-off from, the airline said.
The passenger airliner was last seen at 0155 GMT, it added. It should have landed at 0510.
Flight AH 5017 had 110 passengers and six crew on board, Spanish airline Swiftair, which owns the plane, said.
"In keeping with procedures, Air Algerie has launched its emergency plan," Air Algerie officials, quoted by APS news agency (in French), said.
UN troops in Mali say they understand the plane came down between Gao and Tessalit, the BBC's Alex Duval Smith reports from the Malian capital of Bamako.
Brigadier General Koko Essien, leading the UN troops, told the BBC that the area leading up to the Algerian border was vast and sparsely populated. He added that weather in the area had been bad overnight. Armed groups are also said to be active in the area. However, at the moment, the most probable scenario looks like a plane that came down in bad weather, our correspondent adds.
The plane is operated by Air Algerie and chartered from Swiftair. In a statement (in Spanish), Swiftair said that the aircraft was an MD83 and that they were unable to establish contact with the plane.
An Algerian official had previously told Reuters that the plane was an Airbus A320.
An unnamed Air Algerie company source, speaking to the AFP news agency, said: "The plane was not far from the Algerian frontier when the crew was asked to make a detour because of poor visibility and to prevent the risk of collision with another aircraft on the Algiers-Bamako route. Contact was lost after the change of course."
Flight AH 5017 flies the Ouagadougou-Algiers route four times a week, AFP reported.
Algerian nationals were among those on board, Algerian newspaper Ennahar reported.
French Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier told reporters that it was likely there were also many French nationals on board the plane.

Rico says this'll unravel, eventually...