Malaysia Airlines Jet Goes Missing With 239 on Board Flight MH370 Left Kuala Lumpur Carrying 227 Passengers and 12 Crew to Beijing

KUALA LUMPUR — Malaysia Airlines announced Saturday morning that it had lost contact five hours earlier with one of its flights, which was carrying at least 239 people to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, and had activated a search-and-rescue team.

The plane, a Boeing 777-200 operating as Flight MH370, took off at 12:41 a.m. Air traffic control in Subang, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, lost contact with the plane almost two hours later, at 2:40 a.m. The plane was scheduled to land at 6:30 a.m. in Beijing, but there was no further word on its fate by early Saturday afternoon.

Vietnamese officials told local news media that the aircraft had never reached the air traffic control region for Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, after the plane was supposed to have passed over the ocean between northern Malaysia and southernmost Vietnam.

Malaysia Airlines said the flight had 227 passengers aboard, including two infants, and a crew of 12. Airline staff members have begun contacting the families of passengers and crew members. “Our thoughts and prayers are with all affected passengers and crew and their family members,” the airline’s statement said.Chinese officials expressed immediate concern. “We are extremely worried upon hearing this news,” Qin Gang, the spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said in a statement. “We are currently in contact with relevant parties and are doing what we can to understand and confirm relevant circumstances.”

He added that the Foreign Ministry, the Chinese Embassy in Malaysia and the Chinese Embassy in Vietnam had begun emergency procedures. If the flight was traveling in a straight line, it would have been traveling north up the entire length of Vietnam and Vietnam’s coastal waters.

VnExpress, an online newspaper in Vietnam, quoted Dinh La Thang, Vietnam’s transportation minister, as saying that the flight had not reached the so-called flight information region for Ho Chi Minh City.

Chinese air traffic control authorities said the plane had not entered airspace that they control or established communications with Chinese air traffic control, according to the state-owned China Central Television. Malaysia Airlines said more than 150 Chinese and four Americans were aboard the plane.In the terminal at Beijing International Airport where Flight MH370 had been scheduled to arrive, a woman burst into tears while on a telephone.

Liu Meng, 26, said he had been at the airport since shortly before the flight’s scheduled arrival time, waiting for his boss to return from a business trip. The boss’s relatives had been calling Mr. Liu with questions, and, he said, he had nothing to tell them.

A Malaysian man who gave only his surname, Zhang, said he had been waiting at the airport for two Malaysian friends on the flight, but the airport authorities had told him only that the flight had been delayed; he learned news of the aircraft’s disappearance from reading about it online.

There have been two previous crashes of Boeing 777s. Last July 6, an Asiana plane came in too slow and at too low an altitude and crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport. Three people were killed and several others suffered serious permanent injuries. So far it does not appear that there was a mechanical problem with that aircraft.

In January 2008, a British Airways 777 came in short of the runway at Heathrow in London. Both engines failed. The problem was traced to icing in the fuel system. Nobody was killed.