Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (2014): A hidden turn, then a public ocean

A right flaperon found on Réunion in July 2015 was identified as from 9M-MRO. Other fragments later appeared on western Indian Ocean shores. Malaysia’s Annex 13 safety investigation, published on 30 July 2018, could not determine who was at the controls after the turn or why the aircraft left the route. Ocean Infinity’s 2018 private search also failed to locate the wreck. The case remains unsolved.

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.