Malaysia Airlines Flight From Kuala Lumpur to Beijing Disappears

I saw this story last night but it was still developing.  Malaysia Airlines is reporting that it lost contact with a flight going from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing about 2 hours after departure.

The plane flying the route this day was a 777-200ER.  While Malaysia Airlines bought those planes at the tail end of the 1990s, that’s really not terribly old for a plane, especially given the safety record Boeing has with that plane.

What’s truly odd here is that there was no distress signal from the plane at all.  It just lost contact.  Search and rescue have been under way for almost 12 hours now and there are some disturbing signs like two oil slicks in the water that have been found that likely could be from where the two engines may have hit the water upon contact.

This is a developing story and a scary one at that.  With the increase in reliability of technology we rarely hear about big jetliners like this crashing.  I can’t remember the last time I heard of one disappearing with no distress signal.