Malaysia airlines flight carrying 239 people crashed into the sea – unconfirmed reports

Anxiety in Beijing International Airport as Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 goes missing. Malaysia Airlines said flight MH370 lost touch with Subang Air Traffic Control around 02:40 local time Saturday morning. The aircraft left Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 00:41 and was expected to land in Beijing at 06:30 local time (22:30 GMT). READ MORE: http://on.rt.com/2nyqfy (Photo: Reuters/Kim Kyung Hoon) Malaysia airlines flight carrying 239 people crashed into the sea – unconfirmed reports Published time: March 08, 2014 00:34 Edited time: March 08, 2014 06:49 Get short URL A man takes pictures of a flight information board displaying the Scheduled Time of Arrival (STA) of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 (top, in red) at the Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, March 8, 2014. (Reuters / Kim Kyung Hoon) Share on tumblrTags Accident, Asia, Planes Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 carrying 239 people crashed into the sea, reports Vietnamese state media citing a Navy official. The craft disappeared from radars early on Saturday morning over Vietnamese airspace. Vietnamese state media said the plane came down close to Vietnam’s Tho Chu Island, however these reports have not yet been confirmed by Malaysia Airlines. At a press conference in Beijing, representatives from Malaysia Airlines said no wreckage has yet been found and they have deployed boats and helicopters in the area to verify reports from the Vietnamese Navy. Malaysia Airlines said flight MH370 lost touch with Subang Air Traffic Control around 02:40 local time Saturday morning The aircraft left Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 00:41 and was expected to land in Beijing at 06:30 local time (22:30 GMT). Despite local news reports, Vietnamese and Malaysian rescue crews have not located the plane’s signal, but Hanoi believes the craft disappeared in Vietnamese airspace. The flight was carrying 227 passengers, including two infants, and 12 crew members, the airline said in a statement. "Malaysia Airlines is currently working with the authorities who have activated their search and rescue team to locate the aircraft," the airline added. There were 14 nationalities represented among the 227 passengers, according to airline officials. Passengers include 153 Chinese, 38 Malaysians, 12 Indonesians, seven Australians, four Americans, and one Russian, among others. A woman (C), believed to be the relative of a passenger onboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, covers her face as she cries at the Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing March 8, 2014. (Reuters / Kim Kyung Hoon) “Our team is currently calling the next-of-kin of passengers and crew,” Malaysia Airlines said in a further statement.“Focus of the airline is to work with the emergency responders and authorities and mobilize its full support.” The last contact the plane had with air traffic controllers was 120 nautical miles off the east coast of the Malaysian town of Kota Bharu, the airline said on Saturday. The pilot of the flight was 53-year-old Malaysian national Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah who has logged a total of 18,365 flying hours and has been working for Malaysian airlines since 1981. China is assisting Malaysia Airlines with the search for the plane, Chinese state television reported. "We are very worried after learning the news. We are trying to get in touch with relevant parties to check it out," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in statement. The flight was a codeshare with China Southern Airlines. Prior to July 2013's deadly crash of an Asiana Airlines 777 in San Francisco, the aircraft had been one of only a few long-range jets built by Boeing and Airbus to have never recorded a fatality. The 777 first flew in 1994, and was introduced into commercial service in 1995. Boeing had delivered 1,100 of the aircraft around the world as of last year. "We're closely monitoring reports on Malaysia flight MH370," Boeing tweeted. "Our thoughts are with everyone on board." ============================= How can jet disappear? In the ocean, it's not hard By EILEEN NG, KRISTEN GELINEAU and SCOTT MAYEROWITZ— Mar. 10, 2014 8:18 PM EDT You are hereHome » US Airways Group Inc » How can jet disappear? In the ocean, it's not hard Read more Why Malaysia Airlines jet might have disappeared Vietnam says it may have found missing jet's door Indonesian Navy pilots Maj. Bambang Edi Saputro, left, and 2nd Lt. Tri Laksono check their map during a search operation for the missing Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 over the waters bordering Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand near the Malacca straits on Monday, March 10, 2014. In an age when people assume that any bit of information is just a click away, the thought that a jetliner could simply disappear over the ocean for more than two days is staggering. (AP Photo/Binsar Bakkara) By: EILEEN NG (AP), KRISTEN GELINEAU (AP), SCOTT MAYEROWITZ (AP)KUALA LUMPUR, MalaysiaCopyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — In an age when people assume that any bit of information is just a click away, the thought that a jetliner could simply disappear over the ocean for more than two days is staggering. But Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is hardly the first reminder of how big the seas are, and of how agonizing it can be to try to find something lost in them. It took two years to find the main wreckage of an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. Closer to the area between Malaysia and Vietnam where Saturday's flight vanished, it took a week for debris from an Indonesian jet to be spotted in 2007. Today, the mostly intact fuselage still sits on the bottom of the ocean. "The world is a big place," said Michael Smart, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Queensland in Australia. "If it happens to come down in the middle of the ocean and it's not near a shipping lane or something, who knows how long it could take them to find?" Amid the confusion, officials involved in the search say the Malaysian jet may have made a U-turn, adding one more level of uncertainty to the effort to find it. They even suggest that the plane could be hundreds of kilometers from where it was last detected. Aviation experts say the plane will be found — eventually. Since the start of the jet age in 1958, only a handful of jets have gone missing and not been found. "I'm absolutely confident that we will find this airplane," Capt. John M. Cox, who spent 25 years flying for US Airways and is now CEO of Safety Operating Systems, said Monday. The modern pace of communications, where GPS features in our cars and smartphones tell us our location at any given moment, has set unreal expectations. "This is not the first time we have had to wait a few days to find the wreckage." Based on what he's heard, Cox believes it's increasingly clear that the plane somehow veered from its normal flight path. He said that after the plane disappeared from radar, it must have been "intact and flew for some period of time. Beyond that, it's all speculation." If it had exploded midair along its normal flight path, "we would have found it by now." Malaysian civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, whose agency is leading a multinational effort to find the Boeing 777, said more than 1,000 people and at least 34 planes and 40 ships were searching a radius of 100 nautical miles (115 miles; 185 kilometers) around the last known location of Flight MH370. No signal has been detected since early Saturday morning, when the plane was at its cruising altitude and showed no sign of trouble. Azharuddin said the search includes northern parts of the Malacca Strait, on the opposite side of the Malay Peninsula and far west of the plane's last known location. Azharuddin would not explain why crews were searching there, saying, "There are some things that I can tell you and some things that I can't." Malaysian Maj. Gen. Datuk Affendi Buang, who is helping oversee the ongoing search, said the search will take time. "The only thing I could say is it's difficult. There are so many examples of aircraft lost in the sea — you know it can take days, sometimes months, sometimes years," he said. Some aviation experts are already calling for airlines to update their cockpit technology to provide a constant stream of data — via satellites — back to the ground. Information about key system operations is already recorded on the flight data and voice recorders — the so-called black boxes — but as this crash shows is not immediately available. Such satellite uplinks would be costly and the benefit is debated. Just about every major jet to disappear in the modern era has eventually been found. The rare exceptions didn't involve passengers. In September 1990, a Boeing 727 owned by Faucett Airlines of Peru was ditched into the North Atlantic after running out of fuel on its way to Miami. The accident was attributed to poor pilot planning and the wreck was never recovered. More mysterious was the disappearance of another 727 in Africa. It was being used to transport diesel fuel to diamond mines. The owners had numerous financial problems and one day, just before sunset, the plane took off without clearance and with its transponder turned off. It is believed to have crashed in the Atlantic Ocean. One theory, never proven, is that it was stolen so the owner could collect insurance. "I can't think of a water crash in the jet age that hasn't been solved ," said Scott Hamilton, managing director of aviation consultancy Leeham Co. The Malaysia Airlines jet had been headed from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The 239 people aboard were mostly from China. In Beijing, passengers' relatives have complained that the airline has not been forthcoming with information, and that they've had to rely on news reports. Some of those reports, however, have led to dead ends. Those false alarms appeared to leave searchers with little to go on. Whether the plane broke up in midair or crashed into the water, there would be some debris. If the plane broke up "for some aerodynamic reason, like the wing fell off or there was a depressurization, there'd be big chunks of wing and fuselage all over the place. So it'd be very unlikely that it would just be destroyed and turned to dust," said Smart, the aerospace engineering professor. He added that much of the wreckage may be at the bottom of the sea, which is 50 to 60 meters (165 to 195 feet) deep in the area where the plane was last detected. The size of the debris field will be one of the first indicators of what happened, aviation experts say. A large, widespread field would signal the plane likely broke apart at a high elevation, perhaps because of a bomb or a massive airframe failure. A smaller field would indicate the plane probably fell intact, breaking up upon impact with the water. Discovering the debris can take days. A week after an Adam Air flight carrying 102 people vanished over Indonesian waters on Jan. 1, 2007, an Indonesian navy ship detected metal on the ocean floor. But it would take another two weeks for the U.S. Navy to pick up signals from the flight data and cockpit recorders, and seven months for the boxes to be recovered. The fuselage remains on the ocean floor, and Adam Air is now defunct. ___ Gelineau reported from Sydney. Mayerowitz reported from New York. Chris Brummitt and Jim Gomez in Kuala Lumpur and Niniek Karmini in Jakarta contributed to this report. Follow SCOTT MAYEROWITZ on Twitter @GlobeTrotScott Malaysian military says found believed to wreckage of MH 370 near Pulau Perak a small island between M'sia and Sumatra in Strait of Malacca 20 on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 worked with Austin, Texas-based Freescale Semiconductor, company says =========================== Malaysia military tracked missing plane to west coast: source Tue, Mar 11 07:02 AM EDT 1 of 17 By Eveline Danubrata and Niluksi Koswanage KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia's military believes it tracked a missing jetliner by radar over the Strait of Malacca, far from where it last made contact with civilian air traffic control off the country's east coast, a military source told Reuters. In one of the most baffling mysteries in recent aviation history, a massive search operation for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER, now in its fourth day, has so far found no trace of the aircraft or the 239 passengers and crew. "It changed course after Kota Bharu and took a lower altitude. It made it into the Malacca Strait," the military official, who has been briefed on investigations, told Reuters. The Strait of Malacca, one of the world's busiest shipping channels, runs along Malaysia's west coast. The airline said on Saturday that radio and radar contact with Flight MH370 was lost off the east coast Malaysian town of Kota Bharu. Police had earlier said they were investigating whether any passengers or crew on the plane had personal or psychological problems that might explain its disappearance, along with the possibility of a hijack, sabotage or mechanical failure. The plane left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing early on Saturday morning, vanishing from civilian radar screens about an hour after take-off over the sea separating eastern Malaysia from the southern tip of Vietnam. There was no distress signal or radio contact indicating a problem and, in the absence of any wreckage or flight data, police have been left trawling through passenger and crew lists for potential leads. "Maybe somebody on the flight has bought a huge sum of insurance, who wants family to gain from it or somebody who has owed somebody so much money, you know, we are looking at all possibilities," Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar told a news conference. "We are looking very closely at the video footage taken at the KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport), we are studying the behavioral pattern of all the passengers." STOLEN PASSPORTS The fact that at least two passengers on board had used stolen passports, confirmed by Interpol, has raised suspicions of foul play. But Southeast Asia is known as a hub for false documents that are also used by smugglers, illegal migrants and asylum seekers. Police chief Khalid said one of the men had been identified as a 19-year-old Iranian, Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, who appeared to be an illegal immigrant. The identity of the other was still being checked. "We believe he is not likely to be a member of any terrorist group, and we believe he was trying to migrate to Germany," Khalid said of the teenager. His mother was waiting for him in Frankfurt and had been in contact with authorities, he said. Asked if that meant he ruled out a hijack, Khalid said: "(We are giving) same weightage to all (possibilities) until we complete our investigations." Both men entered Malaysia on Feb 28, at least one from Phuket, in Thailand, eight days before boarding the flight to Beijing, Malaysian immigration chief Aloyah Mamat told the news conference. Both held onward reservations to Western Europe. Police in Thailand, where the passports were stolen and the tickets used by the two men were booked, said they did not think they were linked to the disappearance of the plane. "We haven't ruled it out, but the weight of evidence we're getting swings against the idea that these men are or were involved in terrorism," Supachai Puikaewcome, chief of police in the Thai resort city of Pattaya, told Reuters. (Additional reporting by, Siva Govindasamy, Stuart Grudgings, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Yantoultra Ngui in Kuala Lumpur; Ben Blanchard, Megha Rajagopalan and Adam Rose in Beijing; Nguyen Phuong Linh on Phu Quoc Island, Mai Nguyen and Martin Petty in Hanoi; Robert Birsel and Amy Sawitta Lefevre in Bangkok; Alwyn Scott in New York; Tim Hepher in Paris; Brian Leonal in Singapore; and Mark Hosenball and Ian Simpson in Washington; Writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan; Editing by Alex Richardson) ================ Malaysian plane sent out engine data before vanishing .