Malaysia Airlines 777 has gone missing

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/08/us-malaysiaairlines-flight-idUSBREA2701720140308

Flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing lost radio contact somewhere off Vietnam. There are 239 on board.

 

Lots of rumors going on. I hope it's false.

 

Vietnamese and Chinese officials say it has crashed in the South China Sea.

 

Three American adults and an infant aboard, according to numerous reports.

 

This is kind of eerie ... the Twitter feed of a guy who was supposed to be on the flight, but he and a traveling partner missed the flight.

https://twitter.com/KaidenDL

 

Big topic where I work, since the flight was headed to Beijing. We got a text asking if we knew of any colleagues on board. I don't think so. We had a field trip today and the security guy was glued to his Blackberry.

 

An odd quote in NYT article:

"Lt. Col. Pham Hong Soi, the head of the propaganda department of the Vietnam Navy for the region near the crash site, said that one rescue vessel had already been ordered to sea and two more had been made ready for departure."

If he is from the propaganda department can we believe him?

 

We call it "public relations."

Other countries are just a little more honest about their wording.

 

Steve Herman -- ‏@W7VOA 24m

Austria, Italy governments confirm 2 passports used to board #MH370 had been stolen.

 

Those nuggets of information are in this story, but kind of buried in the latter portions of the story.

http://wapo.st/1ckqxkM

 

Something does not seem right with the way the government was handling this, and the added possibility of stolen passports makes me think this even more.

 

Plane just vanishes from cruising altitude. No distress call, no word from the cockpit that anything is amiss, and even with both engines out, a plane ought to be able to glide for 15-20 minutes from that altitude.

I read reports of oil slicks but not of debris.