Malayshia Airlines Plane Crash

Malayshia Airlines Plane Crash

Malaysia Airlines says flight MH370 lost contact with Subang Air Traffic Control 

on March 8, 2014.

View of oil spills seen from a Vietnamese air force plane on Saturday in the search area for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members.

If all the passengers died in the crash it would be the largest number of casualties in a commercial flight since Nov. 12, 2001 when 260 people died aboard a  flight from Kennedy Airport to the Dominican Republic, the Times reports.

Three of the flight’s passengers carried U.S. travel documents — including two small children, a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old.

The Boeing 777 was about an hour into its flight early Saturday, traveling smoothly in clear weather at about 35,000 feet, when it vanished from radar screens. A desperate international search ensued, with any hope of good news disappearing almost as quickly as the 11-year-old plane.

A Malaysia Airlines flight carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew went missing over the South China Sea on Saturday, presumed crashed, as ships from countries closest to its flight path scoured a large search area for any wreckage.

Vietnamese state media, quoting a senior naval official, had reported that theBoeing 777-200ER flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing had crashed off south Vietnam, but Malaysia's transport minister later denied any crash scene had been identified.

"We are doing everything in our power to locate the plane. We are doing everything we can to ensure every possible angle has been addressed," Transport Minister Hishamuddin Hussein told reporters near the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

"We are looking for accurate information from the Malaysian military. They are waiting for information from the Vietnamese side," he said.

Vietnam's state-run Tuoi Tre news also quoted Admiral Ngo Van Phat as qualifying his earlier remarks about a crash site having been identified, saying he had been referring to a presumed crash site beneath the plane's flight path using information supplied by Malaysia.

A crash, if confirmed, would mark the U.S.-built Boeing 777-200ER airliner's deadliest incident since entering service 19 years ago. 

The plane disappeared without giving a distress signal - a chilling echo of an Air France flight that crashed into the South Atlantic on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people on board. It vanished for hours without issuing a distress call.