On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was en route from Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, to Beijing, when it deviated from its planned route, turning west along Peninsular Malaysia.
The plane, a Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers from 15 countries, is believed to have veered off course and flown south for several hours after radar contact was lost. Some officials believe it may have crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean after running out of fuel, but extensive search efforts over the years have yielded no answers, no victims, and no plane.
The reason the plane went off course and its exact location remains today one of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time. This week, officials proposed a new search operation.
Here’s a brief look at what we know about the plane’s disappearance 10 years later.
Investigators searched by air and sea.
The first phase of the search lasted 52 days and was largely conducted from the air, covering 1.7 million square miles and involving 334 search flights.
In January 2017, the governments of Australia, Malaysia and China officially suspended the underwater search for the plane after combing more than 46,000 square miles of the Indian Ocean floor. This effort cost $150 million.
The following January, the Malaysian government launched another investigation in partnership with Ocean Infinity following pressure from the families of the missing passengers and crew. After a few months, the search effort led by Ocean Infinity ended after they found no evidence of the plane’s whereabouts.
Was any wreckage ever found?
While a crashed plane was never found, about 20 pieces of debris believed to be from the plane were found along the coast of the African mainland and on the islands of Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion and Rodrigues.
In the summer of 2015, researchers determined that a large object washed ashore on Reunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean, was a flaperon from a Boeing 777, making it likely that it was debris from Flight 370.
Another piece of debris, a triangular piece of fiberglass and aluminum composite material with the words “No Step” written on its side, was found in February 2016 on an uninhabited beach along the coast of Mozambique.
The Australian government then confirmed in September 2016 that a wing that had fallen on a Tanzanian island was from Flight 370. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau matched its identification numbers with those of the missing Boeing 777.
What are the theories surrounding the disappearance of the plane?
There are plenty of theories, ranging from the outlandish to the provocative, about what caused the plane to disappear. In fact, there are too many to mention here. The lack of information about what happened on the flight has led the public and investigators in several directions.
Some officials believe the plane ran out of fuel, and one theory holds that the pilots tried to make an emergency landing at sea. Others suggest that one or both pilots lost control of the aircraft, that one was a rogue pilot, or that the plane was hijacked.
What does the official government report say?
After more than four years of searches and investigations, a 495-page report published in 2018 did not provide definitive answers as to the fate of the aircraft. The lack of concrete answers devastated the families of the victims, who were hoping for some closure.
Kok Soo Chon, head of the security investigation team, said the evidence available – including the aircraft being manually diverted from its flight path and a transponder being switched off – “points overwhelmingly” to “illegal interference”, which may suggest the plane was hijacked. But there was no evidence of who might have intervened or why.
The report also scrutinized all the passengers and the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and the first officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid. The report examined the men’s financial situation, health, tone of voice in radio communications and even their gait as they walked to work that day. No anomalies detected.
What happens next?
Now, a decade after the plane disappeared with no concrete answers or plane to be found, a new investigation could soon begin.
Malaysian officials said in a statement this week that the government was ready to discuss a new search operation after being approached by Ocean Infinity.
Oliver Plunkett, Ocean Infinity’s chief executive, said in a statement that the company is now able to search again some six years after its previous attempt failed to yield answers.
“This quest is arguably the most challenging and indeed the most appropriate out there,” he said. “We are working with many experts, some outside of Ocean Infinity, to continue to analyze the data in hopes of narrowing down the search area to an area where success can be achieved.”
