Without even a distress call from the pilots, the Boeing 747 broke into four pieces 20 minutes after takeoff from Taipei and plunged more than five miles into the water.
Authorities are searching for the flight, which disappeared from radar screens without sending a distress signal.
Jacob Jones sank in eight minutes without issuing a distress call; the German submarine commander, Kapitänleutnant Hans Rose, after taking two badly injured Jacob Jones crewmen aboard his submarine, radioed the American base at Queenstown with the coordinates for the survivors.
Just over a year after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared over the Indian Ocean without making a distress call, the aviation world faced a new mystery Tuesday: the crash of a Germanwings jetliner in the French Alps with 150 passengers and crew members aboard.
That is what makes incidents like this one when a plane seems to disappear without so much as a distress signal so mysterious.
Without so much as a distress call from the pilot, a China Airlines Boeing 747-200 25 mintoes into a flight from Taipei to Hong Kong broke into four pieces and plunged more than five miles into the Taiwan Strait.
The plane, an Airbus A330-200, hadisappeareded without any distress call.
The jet, bound for Paris from Rio de Janeiro with 228 aboard, disappeared Sunday night without any distress call.
