Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — Southern-ocean announcement · 189

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.

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.