Malaysia Airlines: What we know about flight MH370
Mystery shrouds
the fate of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which has disappeared with
239 passengers and crew en route to Beijing.
There have been reports that debris was found off the Vietnamese island of Tho Chu but these have not been confirmed.
Muhammad Razahan Zamani (bottom right),
24, and his wife Norli Akmar Hamid, 33, were on their honeymoon on the
missing flight. The phone is being held by his stepsister, Arni Marlina
Among the Chinese nationals were a delegation of 19 artists who had attended an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur.
Two male passengers were travelling on passports stolen from an Austrian and an Italian in Thailand in 2012 and 2013 respectively, Interpol said in a statement. The two passengers were en route to Europe via Beijing.
Malaysia plane: Who were the passengers?
At a time as yet undisclosed, a relative reportedly managed to call one of the passengers, who was carrying a Singapore phone. Malaysia Airlines has repeatedly tried to call the same number but no ringtone has been heard.
No distress signal or message was sent but it is believed the plane attempted to turn back from its scheduled path, perhaps towards Kuala Lumpur Airport.
A Malaysian Maritime Enforcement boat searching off north-east Malaysia
No wreckage has been confirmed despite an earlier indication that potential debris from an aircraft had been seen about 50 miles [80km] to the south-west of Tho Chu Island.
Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, head of Malaysia's Department of Civil Aviation, said on Monday: "Unfortunately, ladies and gentleman, we have not found anything that appears to be objects from the aircraft, let alone the aircraft itself."
A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER taking off from Narita Airport near Tokyo, Japan, last year
Weather conditions on this flight are said to have been good and the pilot, 53, who had more than 18,000 flying hours behind him, had been employed by the airline since 1981.
Malaysia Airlines has a good safety record and the jet, a Boeing 777-200ER, is said to be one of the safest because of its modern technology. One of the plane's wingtips was clipped in an incident while taxiing in 2012 but it was repaired and certified as safe.
David Learmount, Flight Global's operations and safety editor, told BBC News: "Today's aeroplanes are incredibly reliable and you do not get some sudden structural failure in flight. It just doesn't happen. It just won't happen."
The presence of two passengers with stolen passports is a breach of security, but could relate to illegal migration. John Magaw - a former under-secretary for the US Transport and Security Administration and former director of the US Secret Service - has told the BBC there were "quite a few people that do fly, especially in that part of the world, with improper identification or false identification".
When an Air India plane crashed in Mangalore in 2010 en route from Dubai, with the loss of 158 lives, as many as 10 fraudulent passports were recovered.
Simon Clemison reports on how planes can just vanish from radar
Debris was spotted the following day but it took nearly two years to locate the flight recorders and remains of the fuselage, deep on the ocean floor. The waters off Vietnam and in the Malacca straits are much shallower.
Flight recorders, or "black boxes" as they are often known, emit ultrasonic signals that can be detected underwater. Under good conditions, the signals can be detected from several hundred miles away.
But without knowing the trajectory of a plane as it went down or fully understanding wind and wave conditions if it crashed into water, searchers sometimes end up criss-crossing huge areas looking for relatively small pieces of wreckage, the Wall Street Journal notes in a things-to-know piece.
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