Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — A hidden turn, then a public ocean · 57

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. 57 Once Malaysia adopted the southern-ocean ending, the world’s search map changed and the South China Sea theory became a first-week episode. Keep Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with “A hidden turn, then a public ocean” and 24 from 2014. A physical object from 9M-MRO on a western Indian Ocean island confirmed that the satellite ocean was not only a model.

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. 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.

In 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 keeps 24 and “A hidden turn, then a public ocean.” Change the verb when the status changes. Keep Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with “A hidden turn, then a public ocean” and 24 from 2014. 242014

Figures to keep

Year in the file: 2014
Figure that fixes it: 24
Case: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
Line that was public: A hidden turn, then a public ocean

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