On March 8, 2014, less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 lost contact with air traffic control. 227 passengers and 12 crew were onboard. Nearly 10 years later, there are still no answers as to what happened.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12:41 a.m. on March 8, 2014. It was scheduled to arrive at Beijing Capital International Airport at 6:30 a.m. local time. About an hour after Flight 370 was scheduled to land in Beijing, Malaysia Airlines announced that it was missing.
Before the mysterious disappearance, there had been no reports of bad weather, and no distress signals from the plane. During the flight at 1:07 a.m., the plane’s last automated position report was sent, and at 1:19 a.m., a voice transmission from the cockpit was relayed to air traffic controllers: “Goodnight Malaysian three seven zero.” Nothing pointed to any issues.
When the plane lost radar contact at 1:07 a.m., it was travelling over the Gulf of Thailand, so that is where the initial search took place.
On March 15, 2014, investigators said that satellite transmissions indicated that Flight 370 had turned sharply off its assigned course and flew West over the Indian Ocean for approximately five hours.
On March 24, Malaysia’s Prime Minister announced the flight was presumed lost in the Indian Ocean with no survivors.
More than two dozen nations joined the search to find the aircraft.
In June 2014, Australian officials involved in the search said radar records suggested Flight 370 was on autopilot before it ran out of fuel over the Southern Indian Ocean.
Investigators looked into the possibility of terrorist involvement after they discovered two of the passengers on board were using stolen passports, but this was ruled out.
One theory as to what happened to Flight 370 is that the passengers and the crew were incapacitated by an oxygen deficiency. The Malaysian Government and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau theorise that everyone on board, including the captain fell unconscious, with the plane flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed. There is the possibility that an accident damaged the plane’s mechanics affecting the oxygen levels, or that someone purposely damaged the oxygen supply in a possible hijacking. On the Australian news program “60 Minutes”, a team of analytics suggested that the captain was the only person awake and in a suicidal state, disabled communications and steered the plane to the ocean. This theory was potentially bolstered by French investigators who in 2019 said one pilot seemed to be in control “until the end”. The final report has not been publicly released.
Another theory, backed by a Canadian Aviation expert and former aeroplane crash investigator, is that one of the pilots deliberately crashed the plane in a murder-suicide. However, in a report released in July 2018, official investigators offered evidence against this claim. Neither the pilot nor the first officer showed any psychological signs suggesting they would deliberately crash the plane. It also stated there “were no behavioural signs of social isolation, change in habits or interests, self-neglect, drug, or alcohol abuse.” among the crew. The lead investigator said that whilst the report was “not ruling out anything” it found evidence against the suicide theory
There is also a theory that a fire on the plane led the pilot to turn the plane back towards Malaysia to do an emergency landing, with the plane being on autopilot whilst the passengers and crew became incapacitated by the fire. There is evidence however that the plane turned again after it had already turned back toward Malaysia.
French investigators found that a “mysterious 200lb load” had been added to the flight list after take off.
In July 2015, a fragment of the wing from Flight 370 washed up on Réunion Island, thousands of miles from Kuala Lumpur. Two more wing fragments have science washed up on the shores of Madagascar and Tanzania. There have been many suspected pieces of the plane found, but nothing apart from the wing fragments have been confirmed as having belonged to the plane.
In May 2018, the Malaysian Government called off the search having found nothing new. They have expressed a willingness to resume the search if anything new arises.
The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was one of the largest and most expensive searches to date, but unfortunately, the plane has never been recovered and there are currently no answers to this mystery.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/summary/Malaysia-Airlines-flight-370-disappearance
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653
