MALAYSIA AIR Flight MH370: Still searching

LESS than three hours after midnight of March 8th, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysian Airlines mysteriously vanished from the skies. En route between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, flight MH370 is still unaccounted for. With 239 souls on board—12 crew and 227 passengers from 14 different countries—it was last heard from about 120 miles of the coast of Malaysia.A big, international search is underway. China, which has put aside controversial territorial claims to the seas around the presumed crash site, is helping. America, too, is sending vessels and investigators, as is Malaysia and Vietnam.What happened? While it is obviously premature to state anything for sure, the few known facts allow us to paint a preliminary picture. There are a some disturbing details: no distress signal or radio call was received by air traffic control stations in Malaysia or Vietnam nor by other aircrafts in the area. This suggest a catastrophic event of some kind or a physical or technical impediment for the crew to communicate. More upsetting is the revelation that at least two of the passengers were not who they seemed to be: their passports turned out to have been stolen in Thailand and their original owners (an Italian and an Austrian) were not on the plane. As other details emerge from the passenger manifest (initially leaked from Beijing Airport, before many of the families have been ...

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