Before boarding a Malaysia Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, a Dutch passenger reportedly took a photo of the plane and posted it to Facebook "just in case it disappears."
The photo now serves as an eerie foreshadowing of what awaited the plane's passengers.
A Malaysia Airlines passenger plane carrying 295 people was shot down over a town in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, drawing parallels to Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which disappeared over the South China Sea on March 8 with 239 people aboard.
Both flights involved Boeing 777 models 鈥� one of the world's most popular and safest jets. The flights were both also en route Malaysia's capital of Kuala Lumpur.
Malaysia Airlines' CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said late last month that business had picked after its passenger jet disappeared. But Yahya said a radical operational overhaul in order for the airline to survive.
The search, expected to take years and cost tens of millions of dollars at a minimum, has produced no sign of the aircraft.
The eight countries involved in the search are continuing to negotiate on how to fund the next phase of the sonar search of almost 56,000 square kilometres of seabed beneath water up to seven kilometres deep.
While mystery continues to surround the disappearance of flight 370, as the plane's "black box" has yet to be found, investigators should be able determine exactly how the latest Malaysia Airlines flight crashed.
"Was the airline warned, was it intercepted?" CTV's aviation consultant Mark Miller told News Channel on Thursday. "The problem is this in an area currently held by rebels, western investigators may not be able to get in there to look at the wreckage."
