Malaysia Airlines Plane from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing Missing in Vietnam Airspace Friday March 07,2014

 Malaysian Airlines jet with 239 people on board that is feared to have crashed after it lost contact flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. 

Flight MH370 was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it lost contact over Vietnam

On board were 153 Chinese, 38 Malaysians, 12 Indonesians, seven Australians, three French, four Americans, two each from New Zealand, Canada and Ukraine, and one each from Russia, Italy, Taiwan, the Netherlands and Austria.

The pilot of the passenger plane is Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a 53-year-old Malaysian who joined the airline in 1981. 

His co-pilot was 27-year-old First Officer Fariq Ab. Hamid, also from Malaysia, who joined the airline in 2007. 

 The Vietnamese Navy confirmed that it had picked up the aircraft's emergency locator signal, which was coming the sea, 153 miles south of Phu Quoc island.

Vietnamese navy vessels were sailing to an area south of the Vietnamese Island of Phu Quoc after radar scans reportedly showed the Malaysian jet crashing there.

Admiral Ngo Van Phat told the Vietnamese newspaper Tuoi Tre that radar showed the aircraft had crashed into the sea off the southern tip of Vietnam, close to the border with Cambodia.

It was hoped the naval ships, along with other vessels, would be able to reach the area before darkness fell, to increase the chances of finding any survivors or wreckage.

An unconfirmed report on a flight tracking website said the aircraft had plunged 650ft and changed course shortly before all contact was lost. 

The route would have taken flight MH370, a B777-200 aircraft, across the Malaysian mainland in a north-easterly direction and then across the Gulf of Thailand.

Odisha Sand Artist Sudarshan Pattnaik's work on Malaysian airlines  

Note

If the aircraft has crashed, and all the passengers and crew are killed, it would the deadliest aviation incident since November 2001.

In that incident, 265 people died after an American Airlines Airbus A300 crashed in Belle Harbor, Queens, after leaving JFK Airport in New York. The deaths included five people on the ground.