A Malaysia Airlines flight carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared from radar systems on Friday — and authorities still have no clue where it's gone.
‘‘So far there’s no report of any sightings,’’ Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, director general of Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation, said at a Sunday morning news conference in Kuala Lumpur on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The company says it is "fearing for the worst."
Thirty-four aircraft, 40 ships, and officials from no fewer than 8 countries are involved in the search.
That an international jet liner can apparently vanish while cruising at 35,000 feet, with no sign of a distress signal or trouble, has rattled the nerves and captured the attention of many. That is, after all, the safest portion of a flight.
While we don't know much of the plane's whereabouts, or what happened to it after it broke contact with an air control tower about two hours after takeoff, some details are beginning to coalesce.
What Happened?
Officials leading the search so far have been unable to identify a field of debris — which is unusual for a plane that may have plunged into the sea. “The fact that we are unable to find any debris so far appears to indicate that the aircraft is likely to have disintegrated at around 35,000 feet,” a source involved in the search told Reuters.
The chief of Malaysia’s air force said there were signs the aircraft may have attempted to turn back towards his country. "We are trying to make sense of this," Rodzali Daud said at a news conference. "The military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back, and in some parts this was corroborated by civilian radar."
But they didn’t tell air traffic control they were attempting such a maneuver, as is commonly required.
Late Sunday night, Vietnamese authorities said a military plane may have spotted an object floating it the water, identifying it as a possible piece of the tail or an inner door. That, plus the sighting of two large oil slicks off the coast of Vietnam, have led the authorities to direct their focus on a 50-nautical mile radius area.
Who Was On Board?
239 people were aboard the missing aircraft, including 12 crew members. Two of the passengers were infants. Two-thirds of the passengers aboard the flight to Beijing were Chinese. Three people on board were American: IBM employee Philip Wood, 51, and two children, Nicole Meng, 4, and Yan Zhang, 2.
‘‘He was a wonderful person and very intelligent,’ Wood’s mother Sondra Wood of Keller, Texas said of her son. ‘‘I could talk forever about him. He’s my son, and any mother would be proud of their son.’’
Among the passengers were a group of 24 painters and calligraphers, returning from a conference called the “Chinese Dream”, which celebrated diplomatic relations between China and Malaysia. Five ticketed passengers failed to board the flight before it left the gate, and their luggage was removed from the plane. And then there were the two passengers traveling using stolen passports.
Stolen Passports reported case
Two of the passengers on board had used stolen passports, raising the specter of terrorism as a cause of the missing jet. While not ruling anything out, Malaysia Airlines’ CEO says they have not identified this as an act of terrorism.
“While the stolen passports are interesting, they don’t necessarily say to us that this was a terrorism act,” he told reporters. Abdul Rahman, the director general, told reporters. “We have the CCTV recordings of those passengers from check-in bags to the departure point,” and that footage is being reviewed.
"Early indications show some sort of a security lapse, but I cannot say any further right now," an official told CBC. The two individuals flying under the stolen passports were both booked on a flight out of Beijing headed to Amsterdam.
One was then scheduled to continue to Copenhagen, and the other to Frankfurt. They booked the two tickets simultaneously, their numbers listed consecutively.
Leading Theories
There are a number of theories floated by authorities leading the search as of Sunday night Malaysian time, but none of them are backed by enough evidence for anyone to say for sure. Among them: an act of terrorism, catastrophic engine failure or mechanical failure. Authorities, however, remain focused on finding the missing jet before jumping to any conclusions.
The incident brings to mind two mid-air explosions in the 80’s, both aircraft were traveling at 31,000 feet: Air India Flight 182 and Pan Am Flight 103, which was bombed in the air over Lockerbie, Scotland. Another recent mid-air incident, Air France Flight 447, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean after departing Rio de Janeiro in June 2009, was the result of an aerodynamic stall.
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