March 7, 2014 (KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia) -- A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 carrying 239 people lost contact over the South China Sea early Saturday morning on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and international aviation authorities still hadn't located the jetliner several hours later.

The plane lost communication two hours into the flight in Vietnam's airspace at 1:20 a.m. (18:20 GMT Friday), China's official Xinhua News Agency said. Vietnamese website VN Express said a Vietnamese search and rescue official reported that signals from the plane were detected about 120 nautical miles (140 miles; 225 kilometers) southwest of Vietnam's southernmost Ca Mau province.

Malaysia Airlines said it was working with authorities who activated their search and rescue teams to locate the aircraft. The route would take the aircraft from Malaysia across to Vietnam and China.


"Our team is currently calling the next-of-kin of passengers and crew. Focus of the airline is to work with the emergency responders and authorities and mobilize its full support," Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said in a statement.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with all affected passengers and crew and their family members," he added.

All countries in the possible flight path of the missing aircraft were performing a "communications and radio search", said John Andrews, deputy chief of the Philippines' civil aviation agency.

Fuad Sharuji, Malaysian Airlines' vice president of operations control, told CNN that the plane was flying at an altitude of 35,000 feet (10,670 meters) and that the pilots had reported no problem with the aircraft. He said the aircraft's last communication was over the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam.

Flight MH370 departed Kuala Lumpur at 12:41 a.m. Saturday (16:41 GMT Friday) and had been expected to land in Beijing at 6:30 a.m. Saturday (22:30 GMT Friday), Malaysia Airlines said.

The plane was carrying 227 passengers, including two infants, and 12 crew members, the airline said. Passengers were from 14 countries, including 153 from China, 38 from Malaysia, seven Australians and four Americans.

At Beijing's airport, authorities posted a notice asking relatives and friends of passengers to gather to a hotel about 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the airport to wait for further information, and provided a shuttle bus service.

Zhai Le was waiting for her friends, a couple who were on their way back to the Chinese capital on the flight. She said she was very concerned because she hadn't been able to reach them.

A woman wept aboard the shuttle bus while saying on a mobile phone, "They want us to go to the hotel. It cannot be good!"

Yahya, the airline CEO, said the 53-year-old pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, has more than 18,000 flying hours and has been flying for Malaysia Airlines since 1981. The first officer, 27-year-old Fariq Hamid, has about 2,800 hours of experience and has flown for the airline since 2007.

Malaysia Airlines' last fatal incident was in 1995, when one its planes crashed near the Malaysian city of Tawau, killing 34 people.

Malaysia Airlines has 15 Boeing 777-200 jets in its fleet of about 100 planes. The state-owned carrier last month reported its fourth straight quarterly loss.

The 777 had not had a fatal crash in its 20-year history until the Asiana crash in San Francisco in July 2013. All 16 crew members survived, but three of the 291 passengers, all teenage girls from China, were killed.

(Copyright ©2014 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

How in the hell can you lose a plane full of people?

Ho Lee Fuk, Capt Sum Ting Wong!

Report of two stolen passports. This plane could have been jacked.

officials told NBC News on Saturday they are investigating terrorism concerns after two people listed as passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines jet turned out not to be on the plane and had reported their passports stolen.

I keep reading about these oil slicks that they think could be from the flight crashing. After all this time would there not be other wreckage visible on the water? A plane that big crashing into the water is going to leave a lot more damage than just some oil spots

No need to worry, they just found it...

I hate friggin planes. Actually,if I'm not driving the car,I'm not comfortable either. Whatever happened,I hope it wasn't terrorism.

So if this was the result of terrorism (which appears more and more likely) - I'm guessing the terrorists sorta failed on this one. Yeah, people died, but that's not really the #1 goal of terrorists is it?

The idea of terrorism is to create fear and chaos, no? Instead, the world is spending 36+ hours wondering what happened and where the plane went? Was it the weather? Mechanical malfunction? Catastrophic failure? Terrorism?

um... if you look at the emergency center in china, there are thousands of people living in fear right now, worrying what happened. if this is terrorism, its another huge win on their part. hell, even im a little freaked by this, it shouldnt be able to happen.

If they used a SAM or something they would have found pieces of the plane floating all over the water. Some sign other than oil slick. This thing is just gone.

Agreed.

I don't think it was terrorism.

Officials investigating the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 plane with 239 people on board say oil slicks spotted by rescue crews in the South China Sea do not belong to the aircraft.

Malaysian maritime officials spotted the slicks and sent a sample to a lab to see if it came from the plane, but the results were negative, said Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, at a press conference late Monday.

More than 48 hours after the plane disappeared from radar screens, a multinational search team consisting of dozens of ships and aircraft had failed to find any sign of the aircraft's fate.

The American guided-missile destroyer USS Kidd joined the USS Pinckney in search efforts Monday, the Navy said. Malaysian officials said the search area will be expanded Monday.

“The amount of water – the distance between Vietnam and Malaysia is probably the size of the state of Pennsylvania, so there really is quite a bit of water that needs to be investigated,” Robert Mark, a commercial pilot and former air traffic controller, said Monday on “Fox & Friends.”

Rahman said that investigators were pursuing "every angle," including the possibility of an attempted hijacking, in an effort to understand what happened that caused the plane to vanish early Saturday morning, local time.

“We don’t know exactly what happened to the aircraft,” he said late Monday, insisting that a search and rescue operation was still ongoing – not a disaster recovery mission.

Searchers were dealt a double blow Monday when a floating yellow object that was believed to be a life raft from the plane when it was spotted Sunday turned out to be the moss-covered cap of a cable reel, according to Vietnam's civil aviation authority. Earlier in the day, Vietnamese officials said that they had not been able to locate a rectangular object that appeared to be one of the plane's doors.

Doan Huu Gia, the chief of Vietnam's search and rescue coordination center, said Monday that four planes and seven ships from Vietnam were searching for the rectangular object but nothing had been found.

There are also questions over how two passengers managed to board the ill-fated aircraft – which was scheduled to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing -- using stolen passports.

A senior Malaysian police official told Reuters Monday that there have been past incidents of people being caught trying to fly out of Kuala Lumpur with explosives and fake passports.

"We have stopped men with false or stolen passports and carrying explosives, who have tried to get past KLIA [airport] security and get on to a plane," the police official said. "There have been two or three incidents, but I will not divulge the details."

Interpol said it knew about the stolen passports but said no authorities checked its vast databases on stolen documents before the Boeing jetliner departed Saturday.

Warning "only a handful of countries" routinely make such checks, Interpol secretary general Ronald Noble chided authorities for "waiting for a tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates."

The thefts of the two passports -- one belonging to Austrian Christian Kozel and the other to Luigi Maraldi of Italy -- were entered into Interpol's database after they were stolen in Thailand in 2012 and last year, the police body said.

Electronic booking records show that one-way flight tickets with those names were issued Thursday from a travel agency in the beach resort of Pattaya in eastern Thailand. A person who answered the phone at the agency said she could not comment.

The ticket purchases reportedly took place almost simultaneously, and the tickets were numbered consecutively, according to the BBC.

A telephone operator on a China-based KLM hotline confirmed Sunday that passengers named Maraldi and Kozel had also bought one-way tickets on a KLM flight that departed from Beijing for Amsterdam on Saturday. Maraldi was to fly on to Copenhagen, Denmark, and Kozel to Frankfurt, Germany.

She said the pair booked the tickets through China Southern Airlines, but she had no information on where they bought them.

As holders of EU passports with onward flights to Europe, the passengers would not have needed visas for China.

Interpol said it and national investigators were working to determine the true identities of those who used the stolen passports to board the flight. White House Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken said the U.S. was looking into the stolen passports, but that investigators had reached no conclusions.

Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference Sunday that authorities were investigating footage of the two people who boarded the plane using the fake passports.

Interpol has long sounded the alarm that growing international travel has underpinned a new market for identity theft: Bogus passports are mostly used by illegal immigrants, but also pretty much anyone looking to travel unnoticed such as drug runners or terrorists. More than 1 billion times last year, travelers boarded planes without their passports being checked against Interpol's database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents, the police agency said.

“The majority of passengers were Chinese – it was a flight going from Malaysia to China. And what’s the group that’s really going after China right now? It’s called the east Turkistan Islamic movement, Ryan Mauro, a national security analyst, told “Fox & Friends” on Monday. “You would think that they would immediately come out and claim responsibility but in the past they’ve waited a month to claim responsibility.”

Rahman also said the baggage of five passengers who had checked in to the flight but did not board the plane were removed before it departed, he said. Airport security was strict according to international standards, surveillance has been done and the airport has been audited, he said.

Meanwhile, hundreds of distraught relatives were gathered in a hotel in Beijing, waiting to be flown to Malaysia. Of the 227 passengers, two-thirds were Chinese. There were also 38 passengers and 12 crew members from Malaysia, and others from elsewhere in Asia, Europe and North America, including three Americans.

"We accept God's will. Whether he is found alive or dead, we surrender to Allah," said Selamat Omar, a Malaysian whose 29-year-old son Mohamad Khairul Amri Selamat was heading to Beijing for a business trip. He said he was expecting a call from his son after the flight's scheduled arrival time at 6:30 a.m. Saturday. Instead he got a call from the airline to say the plane was missing.

Possible causes of the flight’s disappearance included some sort of explosion, a catastrophic failure of the plane's engines, extreme turbulence, or pilot error or even suicide. Establishing what happened with any certainty will need data from flight recorders and a detailed examination of any debris, something that will take months if not years.

Malaysia's air force chief, Rodzali Daud, said radar indicated that before it disappeared, the plane may have turned back, but there were no further details on which direction it went or how far it veered off course.

"The military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back, and in some parts this was corroborated by civilian radar," Daud said at a news conference.

Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said pilots are supposed to inform the airline and traffic control authorities if the plane does a U-turn. "From what we have, there was no such distress signal or distress call per se, so we are equally puzzled," he said.

A total of 34 aircraft and 40 ships from Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, China and the United States were deployed to the area where ground controllers lost contact with the plane on the maritime border between Malaysia and Vietnam.

Family members of Philip Wood, a 50-year-old IBM executive who was on board the plane, said they saw him a week ago when he visited them in Texas after relocating to Kuala Lumpur from Beijing, where he had worked for two years.

The other two Americans were identified on the passenger manifest as 4-year-old Nicole Meng and 2-year-old Yan Zhang. It was not known with whom they were traveling.

After more than 30 hours without contact with the aircraft, Malaysia Airlines told family members they should "prepare themselves for the worst," Hugh Dunleavy, the commercial director for the airline, told reporters.

Finding traces of an aircraft that disappears over sea can take days or longer, even with a sustained search effort. Depending on the circumstances of the crash, wreckage can be scattered over a large area. If the plane enters the water before breaking up, there can be relatively little debris.

A team of American experts was en route to Asia to be ready to assist in the investigation into the crash. The team includes accident investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, as well as technical experts from the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing, the safety board said in a statement.

Malaysia Airlines has a good safety record, as does the 777, which had not had a fatal crash in its 19-year history until an Asiana Airlines plane crashed last July in San Francisco, killing three passengers, all Chinese teenagers.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.