A Malaysia Airlines flight carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew has gone missing over the South China Sea, presumed crashed.
The airline on Saturday said search and rescue teams from countries closest to the missing plane's flight path had been sent to scour a large area near its last known location. The search efforts by flight have been stopped until morning, while efforts by sea still continue, according to authorities.
A crash, if confirmed, would mark the United States-built Boeing 777-200ER airliner's deadliest incident since entering service 19 years ago.
Malaysia's flag carrier said flight MH370 disappeared, without giving a distress signal, at 2:40am local time on Saturday (18:40 GMT Friday), about two hours after leaving Kuala Lumpur International Airport. It had been due to arrive in Beijing at 6:30am local time on Saturday (22:30 GMT Friday).
Vietnam said its rescue planes spotted two large oil slicks in the sea and it was sending boats to the area.
"Two of our aircraft sighted two oil slicks around 15 to 20 kilometers long, running parallel, around 500 meters apart from each other," the army's deputy chief of staff, Vo Van Tuan, told state-run VTV.
No visual confirmation
Al Jazeera's Rob McBride, reporting from Beijing, said that it is a very hard situation for the airline as it does not have the visual confirmation that its plane has crashed. "The company does not want to say so until it has confirmation," he said.
Al Jazeera’s Florence Looi, reporting from Kuala Lumpur, said that the search teams concentrate rescue efforts on the area where contact was last made with the aircraft.
According to Looi, the airline released the names of the passengers on board which means that they managed to contact all next of kin of the passengers on board.
"There are more than a dozen Malaysian planes involved in the search and rescue mission and about nine ships from the same country. Singapore and Vietnam are also involved in the mission. And the US is sending two ships," she said.
The flight was carrying 154 people from China or Taiwan including one infant, 38 Malaysians, seven Indonesians, six Australians and five Indians, the airline said.
There were also three US citizens including an infant, four from France, two passengers each from New Zealand, Ukraine, and Canada, and one each from Italy, the Netherlands, Russia and Austria, the airline said in a statement.
Foreign Ministry officials in Rome and Vienna later said names of two nationals listed as passengers matched passports reported stolen in Thailand.
The airline's statement also said the carrier was working with authorities in the search efforts to locate the aircraft.
No distress signal
Ross Aimer, a former pilot with United Airlines, told Al Jazeera it was highly unusual that air traffic control would lose contact with an aircraft without communication from the crew.
"The fact that there was absolutely no distress signal is very disturbing. This is almost unprecedented that we lose an aircraft in such a way … In that area of the world, over Vietnam, there is sporadic radar coverage to begin with," he said.
A report by China's Xinhua news agency said contact was lost with the plane while it was near Vietnamese airspace.
The airline's Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route passes roughly over the Indochinese Peninsula.
PHOTO CAPTION
Malaysia Airlines aircraft are seen at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) in Sepang outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 09 September 2013.
Al-Jazeera