Rescue teams have been activated and are currently searching for a Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared two and a half hours after take-off on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Aboard the missing Malaysia irlines Flight MH370 777 are 227 passengers that include 2 infants and the aircraft’s twelve-man crew.The aircraft diappeared at 2:40 am Malaysian time (9:40 am AK time).

Subang Air Traffic Control lost contact with the aircraft as the aircraft was nearing the halfway point between its origin and destination over Vietnam. Although a small part of the flight would have been over water, the aircraft was well over land at the time contact was lost.

Malaysia Airlines is an old and established airlines and has been in business for 77 years. It had its beginnings as Wearne’s Air Service in 1937. It was begun by two Austrailian brothers, and quickly incorporated that year as Malayan Airways.

The airlines, through its history, has had only three incidents where passengers lives were lost. The deadliest occured in December of 1977 when one of the airline’s 737s was hiijacked and crashed. All 100 people were killed in that incident.

The most recent fatal crash of that airlines was in 1995 when a Fokker 50 crashed as it approached for a landing at Tawau, Sabah. 34 people were killed in that crash.

This is the second fatal crash of Boeing’s 777 this year. The first was an Asiana Airlines flight carrying 291 passengers into San Francisco that crashed into the seawall during approach there. That incident saw three lives lost.