Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 : A night departure for Beijing

MH370 is a missing airliner with a reconstructed track, a handful of authenticated fragments and no cockpit voice, no flight-data recorder and no agreed cause. What the radar and satellite paper show Civil secondary radar and radio place 9M-MRO on the planned route until shortly after 01:19 MYT. Malaysian military primary radar, released in reconstructed form, then shows a westward crossing of the peninsula and a later southbound leg. Those plots are the main reason official English speaks of a South China Sea corridor that became an Indian Ocean problem.

Inmarsat’s ground station kept receiving automated handshakes from the aircraft’s satellite data unit for hours after the last voice call. Burst-frequency-offset analysis, later reviewed by the ATSB and by an international working group, produced the southern-arc end-of-flight estimate that moved the search from the South China Sea to the southern Indian Ocean. The method is technical and public; it is not a photograph of the seabed.

Surface and underwater searches ran first in the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca, then, after the 24 March announcement, in a vast box west of Australia. The ATSB-led seabed survey covered about 120,000 square kilometres. It found no 777. A 2018 Malaysian safety report recorded the known facts, the debris identifications and the absence of a cause. It did not name a perpetrator and did not close the wreck-file.