Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (2014): A night departure for Beijing

On 8 March 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing and vanished; satellite handshakes and later Indian Ocean debris never produced a located wreck or a cause. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777-200ER registered 9M-MRO, left Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 00:41 MYT on 8 March 2014 for Beijing Capital. On board were 227 passengers and 12 crew. The last air-traffic-control radio from the cockpit, after a routine handoff toward Ho Chi Minh, was “Good night Malaysian three seven zero.” Secondary radar returns ceased over the South China Sea near the waypoint IGARI. Primary military radar later showed the aircraft turning west across the Malay Peninsula, then northwest, then south — a track that civil controllers did not see in real time.

Inmarsat, the satellite operator that still received hourly handshake signals from the aircraft’s data unit, later reconstructed a southern Indian Ocean corridor. On 24 March 2014 Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, announced that the flight had ended in that ocean with no survivors. The statement was a political and technical judgment from satellite analysis, not a photographed wreck. Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau then led a seabed search west of Australia that ended on 17 January 2017 without the airframe.

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.