HONG KONG — Malaysia Airlines announced on Saturday morning that it had lost contact five hours earlier with one of its flights, which was carrying 239 people to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, and had activated a search-and-rescue team to find the plane.
The red-eye flight, 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 airline did not say where the plane was at that time.
The airline issued its statement at 7:24 a.m. after the plane had not made its scheduled arrival time in Beijing of 6:30 a.m. Saturday. China and Malaysia are in the same time zone.
Malaysia Airlines said that the flight had 227 passengers aboard, including two infants, and a crew of 12.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-says-plane-with-over-200-aboard-is-missing.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print