Malaysia Airlines jetliner vanishes with 239 people on board

Malaysian authorities have not confirmed that a Malaysia Airlines flight, carrying 239 passengers and crew, had crashed after it went missing over the South China Sea, Transport Minister Hishamuddin Hussain said on Saturday.

Hishamuddin said there was no sign of any plane wreckage and denied Vietnamese state media reports that the plane had crashed south of an island off Vietnam.

"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," Hishamuddin 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."

Vietnam media report

Vietnam state media reported the Boeing 777-200ER crashed into the sea, quoting a senior naval official.

The flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing had been missing for hours when Vietnam's Tuoi Tre news quoted Admiral Ngo Van Phat as saying he had asked boats from an island off south Vietnam to rush to the crash site.

Malaysia Airlines said earlier in the day that no distress signal had been given and cited early speculation that the plane may have landed in Nanming in southern China.

Flight MH370, operating a Boeing 777-200ER aircraft, last had contact with air traffic controllers 120 nautical miles off the east coast of the Malaysian town of Kota Bharu, Malaysia Airlines chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said in a statement read to a news conference in Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysia and Vietnam were conducting a joint search and rescue, he said but gave no details. China has also sent two maritime rescue ships to the South China Sea to help in any rescue, state television said on one of its microblogs.

"We are extremely worried," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters in Beijing before the Vietnamese report that the plane had crashed. "The news is very disturbing. We hope everyone on the plane is safe." The flight left Kuala Lumpur at 12.21am (8.21pm UAE Friday) but no trace had been found of the plane hours after it was due to land in the Chinese capital at 6.30am (2.30am UAE Saturday) the same day.

"We deeply regret that we have lost all contacts with flight MH370," Jauhari said.

Malaysia Airlines said people from 14 nationalities were among the 227 passengers, including at least 152 Chinese, 38 Malaysians, 12 Indonesians, six Australians and three Americans.

It also said a Chinese infant and an American infant were on board.

If it is confirmed that the plane has crashed, the loss would mark the second fatal accident involving a Boeing 777 in less than a year and by far the worst since the jet entered service in 1995.

An Asiana Airlines Boeing 777-200ER crash-landed in San Francisco in July 2013, killing three passengers and injuring more than 180.

Boeing said it was aware of reports that the Malaysia Airlines plane was missing and was monitoring the situation but had no further comment. The flight was operating as a China Southern Airlines codeshare.

An official at the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV) said the plane had failed to check in as scheduled at 1721 GMT while it was flying over the sea between Malaysia and Ho Chi Minh city.

Lost contact

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 lost contact early Saturday morning (Friday night UAE) on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and international aviation authorities still hadn’t located the jetliner hours later.

The plane lost communication two hours into the flight in Vietnam’s airspace at 1.20am (10.20pm UAE 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 kilometres) 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 mobilise 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 metres) 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 12.41am on Saturday (8.41pm UAE Friday) and had been expected to land in Beijing at 6.30am on Saturday (2.30am UAE Saturday), 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 kilometres 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.