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A US Air Force refuelling aircraft disappeared off the radar over the English Channel last night. The Boeing KC-135R Stratotanker left Amiens in northern France at 0.05am local time (11.05pm BST) and was last reported on a flight tracking website between Dover and Calais 15 minutes later. It is not yet known why the plane - flying under the code QID72 and based at Mildenhall in Suffolk - fell off the radar at 0.20am. The US Air Force was unavailable for comment.

WASHINGTON — The first turn to the west that diverted the missing Malaysia Airlines plane from its planned flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing was carried out through a computer system that was most likely programmed by someone in the plane’s cockpit who was knowledgeable about airplane systems, according to senior American officials. Instead of manually operating the plane’s controls, whoever altered Flight 370’s path typed seven or eight keystrokes into a computer on a knee-high pedestal between the captain and the first officer, according to officials. The Flight Management System, as the computer is known, directs the plane...

The mystery surrounding the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has thickened somewhat as family members of passengers have reported mobile phones ringing, but nobody answering. International Business Times reports that 19 families have signed a joint statement saying that passengers' cell phones connected after the flight had been reported missing. In each case, the phone would ring, but the call would be hung up. The sister of one of the Chinese passengers among the 239 people on board the missing flight rang his phone live on TV twice at 11:40 on Sunday morning and heard it ringing. She called...

Hunt Is Widened for Lost Malaysian Flight as Frustrations Mount; Debris Proves Unrelated to Jet Three days of fruitless air and sea search for a vanished Malaysia Airlines flight left investigators with no concrete evidence of what happened to the plane or the people aboard. The search area was widened as frustrations mounted across the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam, where the search was concentrated, and in hotels where the families of the missing passengers congregated in Kuala Lumpur and Beijing.