Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, commonly known as MH370, was a Malaysia Airlines passenger aircraft that vanished on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Following the loss of the Boeing 777, which had 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board, a search operation was launched that stretched from the Indian Ocean west of Australia to Central Asia.
At 12:41 a.m. local time, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off and reached a cruising altitude of 10,700 metres (35,000 feet) at 1:01 a.m. At 1:07 a.m., the Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which sent data on the aircraft’s performance, sent its last message, and was turned off. The crew’s final verbal contact was at 1:19 a.m., and the aircraft’s transponder, which communicated with air traffic control, was turned off at 1:21 a.m., just as the plane was about to enter Vietnamese airspace over the South China Sea. Malaysian military and civilian radar started monitoring the aircraft at 1:30 a.m. as it turned around and flew southwest over the Malay Peninsula, then northwest over the Malacca Strait. Over the Andaman Sea, Malaysian military radar lost touch with the aircraft at 2:22 a.m. Flight 370 was last spotted at 8:11 a.m. by an Inmarsat satellite in geostationary orbit over the Indian Ocean, which received hourly transmissions from the aircraft.
The South China Sea was the focus of the first search for the aircraft. Search operations were directed to the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea when it was established that flight 370 had headed west soon after the transponder was turned off. The Inmarsat communication was revealed on March 15, a week after the aircraft vanished. The aircraft may have been anywhere on two arcs, one extending from Java southward into the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia and the other stretching northward across Asia from Vietnam to Turkmenistan, according to the analysis of the signal. On the southern arc, the search region was extended to include the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia, and on the northern arc, Southeast Asia, western China, the Indian subcontinent, and Central Asia. On March 24, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that Inmarsat and the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) had concluded that the flight had crashed in a remote part of the Indian Ocean 2,500 kilometres (1,500 miles) southwest of Australia, based on analysis of the final signals. As a result, it was very improbable that anybody on board would survive.
The accident site’s isolated location complicated the search for debris. Around 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) northwest of Perth, Western Australia, an Australian ship received multiple acoustic pings, presumably from the Boeing 777’s flight recorder (or “black box”). The AAIB examined the Inmarsat data further and discovered a fragmentary signal from the aircraft at 8:19 AM, which was compatible with the position of the acoustic pings, the last of which was detected on April 8. If the signals were from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the flight recorder’s battery life was certainly running out. A robotic submersible was used to perform further searches. However, the pings were dispersed over a large region, the submarine discovered no debris, and examinations revealed that the pings might have been caused by a broken wire in the acoustic apparatus.
Theories arose in the weeks after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, ranging from mechanical failure to pilot suicide. The disappearance of the ACARS and transponder signals sparked continuing suspicion of a hijacking, but no one or organisation claimed credit, and hijackers appeared unlikely to fly the aircraft to the southern Indian Ocean. The fact that the signals were likely turned off from within the plane indicated that one of the crew members had committed suicide, but nothing unusual was discovered in the captain’s, first officers, or cabin crew’s behaviour before the trip.
The first piece of wreckage was discovered on a beach on the French island of Réunion on July 29, 2015, approximately 3,700 kilometres (2,300 miles) west of the Indian Ocean region being searched by Australian officials. 26 additional pieces of debris were discovered on the beaches of Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar, and Mauritius during the following year and a half. Three of the 27 parts were confirmed as being from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, while the other 17 were believed to have originated from the aircraft. Two parts of the cabin interior were found, indicating that the aircraft had broken up in the air or contact with the water, although it was unclear whether the plane had broken up in the air or on impact with the ocean. The aircraft had not experienced a controlled descent; that is, the plane had not been directed to a water landing, according to a study of the Réunion wing flaperon and a piece of the right-wing flap discovered in Tanzania. Because certain potential crash sites would not have produced debris that would have drifted to Africa, the debris locations were utilised to limit the search region in the Indian Ocean.
In January 2017, the Malaysian, Australian, and Chinese governments called off the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The Malaysian authorities permitted Ocean Infinity to continue looking until May 2017, when the Malaysian Transport Ministry stated that the search would be called off. The Malaysian government released its final report on the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in July 2018. Although a mechanical failure was ruled out, and “the change in flight direction presumably came from human inputs,” investigators were unable to establish why Flight 370 vanished.
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