A Malaysia Airlines flight carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members disappeared Saturday, March 8, after departing from Koala Lumpur destined for Beijing. There were no reports of bad weather and no sign of why the Boeing 777-200ER would have vanished from radar screens about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur.
The 11-year-old Boeing, powered by Rolls-Royce Trent engines, took off at 12:40 a.m. from Kuala Lumpur International Airport and was apparently flying in good weather conditions when it went missing without a distress call. The last time Air Traffic Control had contact with Flight MH370 was when they were 120 nautical miles off the East coast of the town of Kota Bharu. Flightaware.com, a flight tracking website, shows the plane flying northeast after its takeoff from Kuala Lumpur, climbing to 35,000 feet before disappearing off of radar.
There is an apparent mystery surrounding the disappearance of this flight. According to Interpol, two passengers used stolen passports on board the plane, one from Italy and the other from Austria. Interpol has the passports recorded in its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database and confirms that they were used by passengers on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. According to CNN, the two passengers who used the passports in question appear to have bought their tickets together.The tickets were bought from China Southern Airlines at identical prices, paid in Thailand’s baht currency, according to China’s official e-ticket verification system Travelsky. The ticket numbers are contiguous, which indicates the tickets were issued together.
The missing Malaysia Airlines plane had suffered damage in the past, airline CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said Sunday. The aircraft had a clipped wing tip, but Boeing repaired it, and the jet was safe to fly.
If in fact, the plane is found and all passengers and crew members are dead it will go down in history as the deadliest airline disaster since November 12, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into a New York neighborhood, killing all 260 people on board and five more on the ground.