The Disappearance of Flight MH370: The Indian Ocean, 2014
2014 · event
Malaysia Airlines flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur shortly after midnight on 8 March 2014 for a routine overnight run to Beijing with two hundred and thirty nine people aboard. Less than forty minutes into the flight the aircraft, a Boeing 777, signed off from Malaysian air traffic control in the ordinary way, and then its transponder stopped. Military radar tracked an unidentified return turning back across the Malay Peninsula. After that, the only trace was a series of automatic hourly signals exchanged with a communications satellite.
Those signals, never designed for navigation, became the heart of the investigation. Analysts used their timing and frequency shift to show that the aircraft had flown on for around six more hours, on a path leading south into one of the emptiest stretches of the southern Indian Ocean. Search vessels mapped and scanned more than one hundred and twenty thousand square kilometres of deep seabed, much of it never surveyed before, in the largest and most expensive search in aviation history.
In July 2015 a wing part washed ashore on the island of Reunion, and further pieces were later found along the coasts of Africa. Drift studies confirmed the general search region without pinning down a location. The official report published in 2018 could not determine the cause, and the search has been resumed since with new technology.
For the families the absence is the story. Relatives from more than a dozen countries, most of them Chinese and Malaysian, have spent years asking for answers and for the search to continue. The disappearance did change aviation. Regulators introduced requirements for aircraft to report their position at much shorter intervals and for tamper resistant tracking in distress, so that an airliner can no longer simply leave the map.