The aircraft landed and was hidden.
Inmarsat analysis, the 24 March 2014 announcement and later Indian Ocean debris contradict a secret landing with a whole airframe.
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Quick answers
What was Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?
A scheduled Boeing 777-200ER service, 9M-MRO, from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March 2014. It carried 227 passengers and 12 crew. It never arrived. The wreck has not been found.
When did contact end?
The last ATC voice call was shortly after 01:19 MYT near waypoint IGARI. Secondary radar then ceased. Military primary radar later showed a westward and then southward track. Inmarsat handshakes continued for hours.
Why do officials say the southern Indian Ocean?
Inmarsat handshake timing and frequency-offset analysis, announced by Malaysia on 24 March 2014 and later used by the ATSB, placed the end of flight on a southern arc. Debris later found on western Indian Ocean shores is consistent with that ocean, not with a landing in China.
Has any of the aircraft been found?
Yes, fragments. A right flaperon on Réunion in July 2015 was identified as from 9M-MRO. Other pieces were later accepted or treated as almost certain. The main wreckage and the recorders have not been located.
What did the 2018 Malaysian report conclude?
The Annex 13 safety investigation could not determine the cause. It recorded the reconstructed track, the debris and the limits of the evidence. It did not name a person as responsible.
Who led the ocean search?
After the southern-arc announcement, Australia’s JACC coordinated and the ATSB led the official seabed search west of Australia, with Malaysia and China as partners. That search ended in January 2017. Ocean Infinity searched again in 2018.
Unsolved is not a licence to invent a hidden landing or a completed accusation.
Aftermath is an unpublished seabed and a published report that still has no cause.
Still open
- Where 9M-MRO lies — Somewhere along a southern-ocean corridor refined by debris drift. No certification exists.
- Who was at the controls after the turn — The 2018 report did not determine this. Public naming is not a finding.
- Why communications stopped — Several systems ceased. The file records the fact and not a proved sequence that this page will treat as a method.
- Whether another search will run — Private and governmental proposals continue. None has yet produced the airframe.
- How families are answered — Whether states treat the missing wreck as a closed chapter or as an open duty is still a political choice.
Myth vs record
The 2018 report named the captain as the cause.
The safety investigation did not determine a cause and did not issue a criminal finding against Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
The wreck has been found.
Fragments have been found. The main wreckage and the recorders have not. Status remains unsolved.
Nothing of the aircraft was ever recovered.
The Réunion flaperon and other identified pieces are from 9M-MRO. They are not a substitute for the wreck site.
Local notes
Australian search English
Perth briefings, ATSB papers and ABC coverage created the southern-ocean voice that English readers still hear: a box on a chart and a flaperon far down-drift.
British technical English
Inmarsat’s London role made MH370 a British engineering story as well as a Malaysian accident file. BBC explainers on handshakes are part of that dialect.
American television English
United States networks often preferred a cockpit suspect to the 2018 report’s open cause. Those hours are sources about memory, not about a verdict.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 remains an unsolved disappearance whose English afterlife is larger than any certified piece of 9M-MRO.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.