Missing Plane Update: Separating Fact From Rumor on Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
By Jobs & Hire Staff Reporter | Mar 10, 2014 03:09 PM EDT
Missing plane update -- after a Malaysia passenger jet seemingly vanished into thin air along with more than 200 passengers two days ago, it seems as though authorities are no more closer to the truth than the rest of the world are.
On Monday, missing plane updates were handed out by investigators but they still had no concrete explanation as to how a large plane could simply disappear off the radar.
For now, the missing plane updates are being provided by numerous boats and planes from various countries that are currently involved in a large-scale search at sea. Relatives of the passengers are still waiting for more news but so far, authorities have told to prepare for the worst.
Here are some of the missing updates provided by authorities regarding Malaysian Airlines Flight 370:
For the flight path, authorities are aware that Boeing 777-200 took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at exactly 12:41 a.m. last Saturday. The plane was scheduled to land in Beijing at 6:30 a.m. the same day after what should have been a 2,300-mile trip. However, air traffic controllers in Subang, outside Kuala Lumpur lost contact with the airplane around 1:30 a.m. just as it was passing over the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam. Authorities have no idea what happened next at this point since no distress signals were issued and the pilots did not inform the tower that there was any problem.
As for the passengers, authorities have confirmed that there were 239 people on board in total, 227 of whom were passengers while the 12 others were crew members. According to CNN, the passengers of the missing plane included people from more than a dozen nationalities, spanning Asia-Pacific, North America and Europe. Most of the passengers were from China or Taiwan at 154 while 38 people were from Malaysia. The mystery here is that two of the passengers have unconfirmed identities after it was discovered that they boarded the plane using stolen passports.
Regarding to the passport mystery, the tickets for two people who used the stolen Austrian and Italian passports were purchased Thursday in Thailand. According to reports, both tickets were one-way and included itineraries continuing on from Beijing to Amsterdam. One of the ticket's final destination was Copenhagen, while the other's was Frankfurt. The two countries' respective embassies confirmed that the original owners of the passports were not on the missing plane. They both had their passports stolen in Thailand but during different instances. The Austrian's passport was stolen in 2013 while the Italian's passport was taken around 2012.
So far, authorities have not yet completely ruled out the possibility of foul play, despite that they have yet to find evidence of terrorism. They are considering illegal immigration as the possible explanation for the stolen passports as it has been known that many illegal immigrants try to enter Western countries using fake passports.
According to CNN, although It's extremely rare for a big, commercial airliner to disappear in midflight, the phenomenon is not entirely unprecedented. In June 2009, Air France Flight 447 was en route from Rio De Janeiro to Paris when communications ended suddenly from the Airbus A330, another state-of-the-art aircraft, with 228 people on board. It took four searches over the course of nearly two years to locate the bulk of Flight 447's wreckage and the majority of the bodies in a mountain range deep under the Atlantic Ocean. It took even longer to establish the cause of the disaster.
Authorities said they will announce more missing plane updates as soon as they uncover anything new.
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