Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: What We Know and Don’t Know

The Boeing 777-200ER jet plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, at 12:41 a.m. Saturday March 22nd.  It was scheduled to arrive in Beijing at 6:30 a.m. the same day, after a roughly 2,700-mile (4,350-kilometer) journey. But around 1:30 a.m., air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane over the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam. The plane’s whereabouts of the plane including the 239 people aboard are currently unknown.

Two male passengers had stolen passports. It was suspected that they two men were going to immigrate to Germany with Australian passports.

Rachel Thorn, a junior at Arrowhead High School, says she thinks the two men were involved with the disappearance of the plane.

“It’s too much of a coincidence that those two guys were on the flight that went missing,” says Thorn.

“I think that there’s so much information that hasn’t been released yet. I mean, who knows if they were really part of it or not?” says Morgan Merbeth, a junior at Arrowhead High School.

The highest concern for most people, specifically the families, are the locations of the passengers and whether they are safe or not. With the 239 passengers aboard and 12 crew members, not one family member has heard anything from any of them since the plane had taken off.

Thorn thinks the passengers are most likely not alive because of the plane possibly crashing into the ocean or land.

“If they can’t find the plane on the land, it most likely crashed into the water which would make it almost impossible to find,” says Thorn.

“I’m not sure where the passengers would be, but I think they’re safe somewhere. I have a feeling that this might have been an attack of a terrorist group,” says Merbeth.

The passengers families were notified just before the news was released to the media by Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, who told journalists in Kuala Lumpur the plane had likely crashed in the south part of the Indian Ocean.

“I can’t even imagine how sad the families would have been to hear that news,” says Thorn, “I don’t think that’s fair.”

“What evidence do they really have that the families are dead? They said they didn’t know where the plane went, so they shouldn’t have told the families that until they knew for sure,” says Merbeth.