On March 8, 2014 at 12:41 am, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The plane was destined to land at Beijing Capital International Airport, but never arrived.
The flight was piloted by young 27-year old Fariq Hamid, who was in training and one trip away from full certification. His trainer and pilot in command was Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a 53-year old senior captain with some of the most experience in the program. Aside from the 10 flight attendants, 277 passengers were aboard the plane, mostly Chinese or Malaysian.
At 1:01 am, Zaharie radioed that the flight had reached a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The Aircraft Reporting System sent its last transmission at 1:07 am, and the final voice communication from the crew at 1:19 am. A few minutes later just prior to the flight heading over the South China Sea into Vietnamese airspace, the plane’s transponder which corresponded with air-traffic control was switched off. The Malaysian military radar began to track the plane as it turned around and flew off course, over the Malay Peninsula and Strait of Malacca. Eventually at 2:22 am, the Malaysian military lost signal of the plane until a satellite detected flight 370 at 8:11 am over the Indian Ocean.
It had been approximately a week since the plane vanished. Searches were being conducted southward from the Indian Ocean to Australia, and eventually all possible routes had been explored. On March 24, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak made an announcement concluding that the plane had crashed in a remote part of the Indian Ocean, southwest of Australia, implying that it was very unlikely anyone on board had survived.
Over the span of a few years, many pieces of debris had been found. Although some had no association to flight 370, many were identified as a part of the Boeing plane. On July 29, 2015, the right wing flaperon was discovered on a French island shore. As time passed, 26 more pieces of debris had been located, 3 of them being confirmed parts of MH370, and 17 classified as likely matches. The discovery of the debris allowed for the location of the crash to be narrowed down, and exactly how the plane plummeted into the ocean. There were 2 pieces of debris located from the interior of the cabin, which suggested that the plane had been split either in the air or from impact. Studies of the right wing flaperon had also determined that there was no controlled descent into the ocean, and there was no indication of a safe water landing.
The search for flight 370 was called off by the Malaysian, Chinese, and Australian governments in January 2017. However, they allowed for Ocean Infinity, an American company, to continue the search until May 2017. The Malaysian government issued their final report on flight 370 in July of 2018.
Investigators have never confirmed an official reason for the plane’s disappearance, although many theories have been looked into. Although mechanical malfunction was a safe explanation, it was unlikely. Before losing connection to the flight, it had been reported that the plane had changed its path by manual input. For this reason, a string of theories related to intentional harm were investigated. Pilot suicide, hijacking, and the plane being shot down (similar to Malaysian Airlines flight 17) were all speculated as the cause of the flight’s failure. A huge revelation in the mystery was made in 2016, when it was revealed that co-pilot and captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah had flown an almost identical route of flight 370’s final path on his home flight simulator, less than a month before the plane departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport. This information led many to believe that Zaharie had committed a planned mass-murder suicide.
The vanishing of flight MH370 has been a massive, if not the biggest controversy in aviation history. Whether there will ever be a confirmed cause for the plane’s crash, it was a huge tragedy and 239 lives were lost. MH370 was the second-deadliest incident of a Boeing 777, as well as the second-deadliest incident under Malaysian Airlines. The mystery remains unsolved, but hopefully one day, answers will rise to the surface.