Originally published March 17, 2014
Most passenger jets in modern fleets were made by America's Boeing Corporation or Europe's Airbus consortium, and the Boeing 777 is a major workhorse of the skies.
The Boeing 777 is a twin-engine jet airliner that can seat from 300 to 450 passengers.
The plane has a range of some 5000 to 9000 kilometers and uses 'fly-by-wire" state of the art computer technology.
The 777 typically flies at a cruise speed of Mach 0.84 or around 950 kilometers per hour.
Boeing first introduced the jet into commercial service in 1995 and today over 1000 of the planes are in service. The planes have an envious safety record.
The Boeing 777 has been involved in just 10 incidents, with a ground worker killed in a refueling fire 2001 and three passengers dying in a botched landing at San Francisco airport in the summer of 2013.
Meanwhile, Pakistan and India now say the missing plane did not enter their airspace, lending credence to the theory that the plane flew southwest into the Indian Ocean.
Twenty-five nations have now joined the search for the missing plane, with scores of ships, planes and satellites scouring the vast search area.
