20 Motorola Employees Were in Missing Plane

20 of the passengers travelling on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 appeared to be working for the chipmaker Freescale. The Texas-based company confirmed that twelve of the employees were from Malaysia and eight were Chinese. It is known that Motorola spun off its chip making division to form Freescale.

Why there were so many Freescale employees on board at the same time? A former Motorola employee said that the company had a policy not to allow that many employees on board a plane at once. Apparently, the company forbade 2 executives and 6-8 regular employees to board the same plane. The reason was situations like that with Flight 370, rare as they are. However, it is unknown whether Freescale still had those rules and ignored them, or the company simply didn't copy them over.
In the meantime, it was unclear why the plane lost radio and radar contact, but it turned out that 4 people with stolen passports were on the passenger lists. The Boeing 777-200ER departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12:41am in good weather and was expected to land in Beijing at 6:30am after making a 2,300-mile trip, but it didn’t. Air traffic controllers outside Kuala Lumpur lost contact with the plane about 1:30am.