* Malaysia Airlines flight loses contact about one hour
after takeoff
* No distress signal or sign of bad weather
* Kuala Lumpur-Beijing flight carrying 227 passengers and 12
crew
* Two passengers were travelling under false identities
By Anuradha Raghu and Nguyen Phuong Linh
KUALA LUMPUR/HO CHI MINH CITY, March 9 (Reuters) – A
Malaysia Airlines flight carrying 227 passengers and
12 crew was presumed to have crashed off the Vietnamese coast on
Saturday, and European officials said two people on board were
using false identities.
There were no reports of bad weather and no sign why the
Boeing 777-200ER would have vanished from radar screens
about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.
“We are not ruling out any possibilities,” Malaysia Airlines
CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told a news conference.
By the early hours of Sunday, there were no confirmed signs
of the plane or any wreckage, more than 24 hours after it went
missing. Operations will continue through the night, officials
said.
There were no indications of sabotage nor claims of a
terrorist attack. But the passenger manifest issued by the
airline included the names of two Europeans – Austrian Christian
Kozel and Italian Luigi Maraldi – who, according to their
foreign ministries, were not in fact on the plane.
A foreign ministry spokesman in Vienna said: “Our embassy
got the information that there was an Austrian on board. That
was the passenger list from Malaysia Airlines. Our system came
back with a note that this is a stolen passport.”
Austrian police had found the man safe at home. The passport
was stolen two years ago while he was travelling in Thailand,
the spokesman said.
The foreign ministry in Rome said no Italian was on the
plane either, despite the inclusion of Maraldi’s name on the
list. His mother, Renata Lucchi, told Reuters his passport was
lost, presumed stolen, in Thailand in 2013.
The 11-year-old Boeing, powered by Rolls-Royce Trent
engines, took off at 12:40 a.m. (1640 GMT Friday) from Kuala
Lumpur International Airport and was apparently flying in good
weather conditions when it went missing without a distress call.
A crash, if confirmed, would likely mark the U.S.-built
airliner’s deadliest incident since entering service 19 years
ago. It would also be the second fatal accident involving a
Boeing 777 in less than a year.
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 monitoring the situation but had no
further comment.
SEARCH AND RESCUE
Paul Hayes, director of safety at Flightglobal Ascend
aviation consultancy, said the flight would normally have been
at a routine stage, having apparently reached its initial cruise
altitude of 35,000 feet.
“Such a sudden disappearance would suggest either that
something is happening so quickly that there is no opportunity
to put out a mayday, in which case a deliberate act is one
possibility to consider, or that the crew is busy coping with
what whatever has taken place,” he told Reuters.
He said it was too early to speculate on the causes.
A large number of planes and ships from several countries
were scouring the area where the plane last made contact, about
halfway between Malaysia and the southern tip of Vietnam.
“The search and rescue operations will continue as long as
necessary,” Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak told reporters.
He said his country had deployed 15 air force aircraft, six navy
ships and three coast guard vessels.
Search and rescue vessels from the Malaysian maritime
enforcement agency reached the area where the plane last made
contact but saw no sign of wreckage, the Malaysian Maritime
Enforcement Agency said.
Vietnam said its rescue planes had spotted two large oil
slicks, about 15 km (9 miles) long, and a column of smoke off
its coastline, but it was not clear if they were connected to
the missing plane.
China and the Philippines also sent ships to the region to
help, while the United States, the Philippines and Singapore
dispatched military planes. China has also put other ships and
aircraft on standby, said Transport Minister Yang Chuantang.
NO DISTRESS CALL
The disappearance of the plane is 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 and
wreckage was found only two days later.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 last had contact with air
traffic controllers 120 nautical miles off the east coast of the
Malaysian town of Kota Bharu, CEO Yahya said.
Flight tracking website flightaware.com showed it flew
northeast over Malaysia after takeoff, climbed to 35,000 feet
and was still climbing when it vanished from the site’s tracking
records a minute later.
John Goglia, a former board member of the National
Transportation Safety Board, the U.S. agency that investigates
plane crashes, said the lack of a distress call suggested that
the plane either experienced an explosive decompression or was
destroyed by an explosive device.
“It had to be quick because there was no communication,”
Goglia said.
He said the false identities of the two passengers strongly
suggested the possibility of a bomb.
“That’s a big red flag,” he said.
If there were passengers on board with stolen passports, it
was not clear how they passed through security checks.
International police body Interpol maintains a database of
more than 39 million travel documents reported lost or stolen by
166 countries, and says on its website that this enables police,
immigration or border control officers to check the validity of
a suspect document within seconds. No comment was immediately
available from the organisation.
RELATIVES ANGRY
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters in Beijing
that China was “extremely worried” about the fate of the plane
and those on board.
The airline said people of 14 nationalities were among the
227 passengers, including at least 152 Chinese, 38 Malaysians,
seven Indonesians, six Australians, five Indians, four French
and three Americans.
Chinese relatives of passengers angrily accused the airline
of keeping them in the dark, while state media criticised the
carrier’s response as poor.
“There’s no one from the company here, we can’t find a
single person. They’ve just shut us in this room and told us to
wait,” said one middle-aged man at a hotel near Beijing airport
where the relatives were taken.
“We want someone to show their face. They haven’t even given
us the passenger list,” he said.
Another relative, trying to evade a throng of reporters,
muttered: “They’re treating us worse than dogs.”
In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Airlines told passengers’ next of
kin to come to the international airport with their passports to
prepare to fly to the crash site, once it was identified.
About 20-30 families were being kept in a holding room at
the airport, where they were being guarded by security officials
and kept away from reporters.
Malaysia Airlines has one of the best safety records among
full-service carriers in the Asia-Pacific region.
It identified the pilot of MH370 as Captain Zaharie Ahmad
Shah, a 53-year-old Malaysian who joined the carrier in 1981 and
has 18,365 hours of flight experience.
