The plane — which had two passengers using stolen passports — vanished off the Vietnamese coast during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing while carrying 239 people, including three U.S. passport holders: Philip Wood, 51, Nicole Meng, 4, and Yan Zhang, 2. Malaysia's air force chief said early Sunday that military radar indicated the missing jet may have turned back to Kuala Lumpur.
Comments (88)BY JOSEPH STRAW AND LARRY MCSHANE / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
PUBLISHED: SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 2014, 9:19 AM
UPDATED: SUNDAY, MARCH 9, 2014, 10:45 AM
Distraught family members crowd Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia after a jetliner with 239 people onboard vanished from air traffic control screens over waters between Malaysia and Vietnam.
Authorities hunting a lost Malaysia Airlines jetliner refused to rule out terrorism Saturday in the flight’s sudden and stunning disappearance over Southeast Asia.
While a daylong search failed to locate missing Flight MH370 or the 239 passengers and crew members aboard, red flags were raised by word that two passengers on the doomed plane boarded with stolen passports. As many as four people may have boarded with false documentation, the Washington Post reported.
The jet vanished during an otherwise routine flight without sending a distress signal, leading investigators to suspect a quick and catastrophic midair incident.
Early Sunday morning, Malaysia’s air force chief said that military radar indicated the missing Boeing 777 jet may have turned back to Kuala Lumpur, but declined to give further details on how far the plane may have veered off course. Rodzali Daud said “there is a possible indication that the aircraft made a turnback,” and that authorities were “trying to make sense of that.”
Philip Wood of Texas, one of three U.S. passport holders on missing flight MH370.
Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said the pilot is supposed to inform the airline and traffic control authorities if he does return, but that officials had received no such distress call.
The Pentagon reviewed initial surveillance data from the location where the plane disappeared and did not find evidence of an explosion, reports the New York Times.
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.
REUTERS/TRUNG HIEU/THANH NIEN NEWSPAPER
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.
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.
The first hints of its likely fate were a pair of massive oil slicks spotted in the South China Sea. But Vietnamese ships and planes searching for the missing jet found no wreckage in the vicinity of the slicks, officials said Saturday night.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Planned route of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
Some debris was spotted elsewhere, but it was unclear if it came from the plane. The search was expanded early Sunday to cover the west coast of Malaysia, officials said.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, asked if terrorism was a possibility, said it was too early to say. “We are looking at all possibilities,” Razak said.
Confirmation that two travelers headed from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing were identity thieves suggested something sinister — although U.S. officials echoed Razak’s caution until more details are known.
MOHD RASFAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A relative of Norliakmar Hamid and Razahan Zamani, passengers on a missing Malaysia Airlines flight, cries at their house in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday.
“This gets our antenna up, for sure,” said Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee. “Once you hear that — stolen passports, a plane disappearing from the radar — you have to go to the full-court press.”
A federal law enforcement source said the U.S. was “still monitoring the situation.”
King said intelligence agencies around the world would no doubt check for “communications among terrorists or any type of chatter” about the flight. But the congressional veteran, along with another federal source, repeated that the investigation was too fresh to reach any conclusions.
MOHD RASFAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Sarah Nor, 55, the mother of 34-year-old Norliakmar Hamid, a passenger on a missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, is seen here at her home in Kuala Lumpur Saturday. She has received no word on the fate of those onboard.
Recovery of the still-missing Boeing 777, long considered one of the safest aircraft in the world, is the first step in deciphering what went wrong near the start of the 2,300-mile trip. The first clues to its possible whereabouts were the two oil slicks spotted by Vietnamese jet pilots — a possible sign of leaking jet fuel.
The plane was inspected just 10 days ago and found “in proper condition,” said Ignatius Ong, CEO of Malaysia Airlines subsidiary Firefly.
A team from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board was dispatched to Asia to aid in the investigation.
The three U.S. passport holders were identified in a manifest posted by Malaysia Airlines as Philip Wood, 51, and the two children, Nicole Meng, 4, and Yan Zhang, 2.
AFP PHOTO / PHILIPPINE MILITARY WESTERN COMMAND
Members of the Philippine Military Western Command map out search-and-rescue operations for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight. Several Asian countries scrambled air and water teams to comb the South China Sea off southern Vietnam on Saturday.
Wood, an IBM employee and father of two boys, was based in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. “We’re all sticking together,” his father, Aubrey Wood, told The New York Times. “What can you do? What can you say?”
Wood’s ex-wife, Elaine, originally from the Bronx, described him in a Facebook post as “a wonderful man.”
Twenty employees of an Austin, Tex.-based tech firm were also aboard the flight. Twelve of the Freescale Semiconductor employees are from Malaysia and eight from China, company officials said.
LAURENT ERRERA/AP
This 2011 photo shows the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that disappeared from air traffic control screens Saturday. The image was taken at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport in France.
Officials in Italy and Austria confirmed Saturday that the names of two passengers on the flight manifest matched passports reported stolen in Thailand. The Italian passport was swiped 18 months ago, while the Austrian travel document disappeared two years ago, officials said.
The two passengers who used fake passports from residents of an Italian and Austrian citizen bought their tickets together from China Southern Airlines, reports CNN. The passengers used Thai currency, the station reports.
Italian Luigi Maraldi, 37, is now living in Thailand, while the Austrian was located in his homeland. Maraldi called his parents in Italy to reassure them of his safety after his name appeared on the flight manifest.
JASON LEE/REUTERS
A woman, whose husband was a passenger of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, attempts to leave a Beijing hotel after complaining that the airline was withholding information.
The U.S. Navy dispatched a warship and a surveillance plane to join the multinational search team that failed to turn up any wreckage across 17 fruitless hours before nightfall in Southeast Asia.
Malaysia sent 15 planes and nine ships, while Vietnam sent two navy boats, two jets and a helicopter.
The twin jets spotted the slicks in the South China Sea; one was about 9 miles long, and the other about 6 miles long, officials said. Each was consistent with the residue of a crash by a jetliner with two fuel tanks, authorities confirmed.
“We are doing everything in our power to locate the plane,” said Malaysia Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
About two-thirds of the likely crash victims were from Taiwan and China, with distraught family members at the Beijing airport steered to a nearby hotel to await the expected delivery of grim news. One woman, boarding a shuttle bus, wept as she spoke on a cell phone. “They want us to go to the hotel. It cannot be good,” she said.
With News Wire Services
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