Originally published March 17, 2014<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The Boeing 777 is a twin-engine jet airliner that can seat from 300 to 450 passengers.<br /> <br />The plane has a range of some 5000 to 9000 kilometers and uses 'fly-by-wire" state of the art computer technology.<br /><br />The 777 typically flies at a cruise speed of Mach 0.84 or around 950 kilometers per hour.<br /> <br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /> <br />Twenty-five nations have now joined the search for the missing plane, with scores of ships, planes and satellites scouring the vast search area.
