On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 mysteriously vanished while traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing — and it's still unclear what caused the plane's disappearance.
Wikimedia CommonsMalaysia Airlines Flight 370, the Boeing 777 that went missing in 2014.
On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 departed Kuala Lumpur for Beijing at 12:41 a.m. local time with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board. But then, at 1:19 a.m., the final voice transmission from the plane was sent to air traffic controllers. Just two minutes later, the transponder in the passenger plane was suddenly switched off.
Before long, the aircraft disappeared from the radar.
Soon, a multinational air and sea search was underway to find the missing MH370, including 60 ships and 50 aircraft from 26 different countries. It was the most expensive search operation in the history of aviation, and it lasted from March 2014 until January 2017, but there was still no sign of the presumed wreckage of Malaysia Flight 370 by the end of the search.
It’s now believed that everyone on board perished in a terrible plane crash into the Indian Ocean. But to this day, the exact fate of MH370 — and what led to its tragic disappearance — remains unknown.
The Final Flight Of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
When MH370 departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8, 2014, it was carrying 239 people, including passengers and crew. Most people on board were Chinese nationals (153), according to Live Science. The crew members were all Malaysian. The remaining passengers were from America (3), Australia (6), Canada (2), France (4), Hong Kong (1), India (5), Indonesia (7), Iran (2), the Netherlands (1), Russia (1), Taiwan (1), and Ukraine (2).
The aircraft, a Boeing 777, was under the command of 53-year-old Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, an experienced pilot with more than 18,000 flight hours, and his 27-year-old co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, who had 2,763 flight hours. Hamid was reportedly engaged and planning his wedding. It was also, The Atlantic noted, his final training flight before he was fully certified.
The flight proceeded as normal during takeoff at 12:41 a.m. and for some time afterward, but at approximately 1:19 a.m., Shah made the final radio transmission to air traffic controllers: “Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.” This was a routine sign-off as the plane entered Vietnamese airspace, but in the context of what was about to happen, it took on a disturbing tone.
Wikimedia CommonsThe scheduled flight path for MH370 on March 8, 2014.
Two minutes later, the aircraft’s transponder was turned off, which made it difficult for civilian air traffic controllers to track. What happened next defied all conventional understanding of aircraft emergencies.
Rather than continuing on its planned northeast trajectory toward Beijing, MH370 made a sharp left turn and began flying southwest across the Malay Peninsula. Malaysian military radar tracked it as it crossed back over the country and headed toward the Andaman Sea, but civilian air traffic controllers were apparently unaware of this deviation as it occurred.
MH370 flew out of range of the military radar at 2:22 a.m., about 200 nautical miles northwest of Penang Island. The final signal from the plane was picked up by an Inmarsat satellite that was in geostationary orbit over the Indian Ocean, which last detected the aircraft at 8:11 a.m.
After that, the whereabouts of the plane were unclear.
What is certain is that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 never landed in Beijing. As for the fate of its passengers and crew, they all almost certainly perished in a crash in the Indian Ocean — but how and why remains a mystery. Years later, the incident remains the deadliest single case of an aircraft disappearance, one that prompted a years-long search with mixed results.
The Search For MH370 Begins
The initial confusion surrounding the plane’s disappearance was compounded by contradictory information and delayed responses. It took several hours before authorities officially declared the aircraft missing, and even longer before the true scope of the mystery was made apparent.
In the modern age, it is basically unfathomable for a Boeing 777 — which is meant to be easily trackable in the air — to simply disappear.
Early search efforts focused on the aircraft’s planned flight path above the South China Sea, where Vietnamese air traffic controllers expected to establish contact with the flight. But as time ticked on without any trace of the plane, the search area expanded dramatically. Then, the revelation of MH370’s westward pivot caused a reorientation of search efforts.
Wikimedia CommonsThe known flight path taken by MH370 when it disappeared.
Soon, an international coordination to find the missing plane was underway. Countries including China, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom contributed ships, aircraft, and satellite resources to the search operation, but even then, they could not locate the plane.
An early breakthrough came after experts discovered that an Inmarsat satellite over the Indian Ocean had received signals from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 after it disappeared from the military radar.
As MH370 flew further off course, it continued to exchange digital “handshake” signals with the Inmarsat satellite. While the signals didn’t contain any specific location data, they did provide some information about the aircraft’s distance from the satellite at various times. It wasn’t a complete answer about the plane’s fate, but it was a start.
Satellite Analysis And The Southern Corridor
Wikimedia CommonsThe Australian navy vessel Ocean Shield using the U.S. Navy’s Bluefin-21 Artemis autonomous underwater vehicle to search for Malaysia Flight 370’s presumed wreckage in April 2014.
Inmarsat engineers, working with international investigators, developed a technique to extract location information from the satellite pings. By analyzing the Doppler shift in the satellite signals — the change in frequency caused by the plane’s movement relative to the satellite — they could determine that MH370 had flown along two possible corridors: a northern route toward Central Asia or a southern route across the Indian Ocean.
The former was quickly ruled out. Countries along that path reported no radar contacts with an unidentified aircraft, meaning MH370 couldn’t have flown over them undetected. That left the southern corridor, which sadly pointed toward one of the most remote areas of the Indian Ocean, far west of Perth, Australia. The final complete signal from Malaysia Flight 370 was received by the Inmarsat satellite at 8:11 a.m., and an incomplete signal representing a “partial” handshake may have been received at 8:19 a.m.
This was more than seven hours after the plane had first taken off, meaning that the plane had bizarrely flown thousands of miles off course.
Thanks to that satellite analysis, investigators determined that Malaysia Flight 370 had crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. Unfortunately, this is one of the most isolated and challenging search environments on Earth, with poor weather conditions and depths reaching over 13,000 feet. To complicate matters further, there are effectively no major ports or airports nearby that could make the search efforts easier.
Still, if there was a chance of finding MH370, it was a chance worth taking.
The Underwater Search For Malaysia Flight 370
The search for MH370 evolved into multiple phases, each with its own unique challenges and a frustrating lack of real results.
An early surface search, involving ships and aircraft from multiple nations, scoured nearly three million square miles of ocean surface looking for debris or survivors. But despite covering an area about the size of the continental United States, no trace of the missing plane was found during this stage.
Wikimedia CommonsU.S. Navy crew members on board the Boeing P-8A Poseidon, searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Attention then shifted to underwater search operations. The search zone, refined through further analysis of satellite data and ocean drift modeling, focused on a roughly 75,000-square-mile area of the southern Indian Ocean.
Autonomous underwater vehicles equipped with side-scan sonar methodically mapped the ocean floor — which also revealed a previously unknown underwater landscape of ridges, valleys, and volcanoes — in what is considered one of the most technically challenging marine operations ever undertaken. Working in depths of up to around 20,000 feet, search vessels battled extreme weather conditions, including high winds and rough seas.
The searchers did discover some previously unknown shipwrecks during this stage of the investigation, but they found no trace of MH370.
After nearly three years, the official search was suspended in January 2017. The effort had cost $200 million in Australian dollars and involved some of the world’s most advanced technology, yet Malaysia Flight 370 remained missing, other than some pieces of debris that had washed ashore.
Debris Discoveries And Drift Analysis
The first confirmed piece of debris emerged in July 2015 on the island of Réunion, a French territory in the Indian Ocean around 2,500 miles away from the main search area. The debris was a flaperon, a wing part from a Boeing 777, linked to MH370 through serial numbers. It validated the theory that the plane had indeed crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean, but it also raised new questions about the exact plane crash location.
NetflixOfficials with a piece of debris from Malaysia Flight 370. This photo was later featured on the 2023 Netflix docuseries MH370: The Plane That Disappeared.
Other pieces of debris eventually washed ashore in places like Tanzania, South Africa, and Madagascar. Three pieces were confirmed to have come from Malaysia Flight 370, and 17 pieces were identified as “likely” to have originated from the aircraft. Sadly, all this seemed to confirm was that the plane had crashed and broken apart, with no new insight into how or why.
The exact crash site of the plane also remained elusive. However, oceanographers did manage to use current patterns and wind data to theorize the likely origin points of the debris fragments. As the University of Western Australia’s Charitha Pattiaratchi wrote in The Conversation:
“The UWA drift analysis accurately predicted where floating debris from MH370 would beach in the western Indian Ocean. It also guided American adventurer Blaine Gibson and others to directly recover several dozen pieces of debris, three of which have been confirmed to be from MH370, while several others are deemed likely.”
Independent drift studies from other researchers came up with consistent results, suggesting the main wreckage might be located further north than the original search area. Because of this, a renewed search effort for MH370 could potentially locate the missing plane after more than a decade.
But even if the full Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 wreckage is found someday, there are still many other unanswered questions that remain.
Lingering Questions And Theories About The Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Crash
Given the unprecedented nature of the disappearance, numerous theories about what happened soon emerged. Some thought the plane ran out of fuel and the pilots unsuccessfully tried to make an emergency landing, while others believed the pilots lost control of the aircraft. More ominously, some theorized that one of the pilots went rogue or the plane was hijacked.
Malaysian authorities, with international assistance, investigated the plane’s sudden, radical course change, the end of the communication between MH370 and air traffic controllers, and the extended flight time, and determined the combination could suggest deliberate human intervention.
Kok Soo Chon, the head of the safety investigation team, said the known pieces of evidence “irresistibly point” to “unlawful interference.”
NetflixSome have accused Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah of orchestrating the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
But why would someone deliberately send this plane to its doom?
An early theory focused on two Iranian passengers on the flight, Pouria Nour Mohammad and Seyed Mohammed Rezar Delawar, who were discovered to have been traveling with forged passports. But an investigation into the men showed no link to any known terror group. Instead, evidence shows that both men were simply hoping to seek asylum in Europe.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah became a particular focus of investigation after authorities discovered that someone had conducted simulated flights using his home flight simulator — including one route that ended in the Indian Ocean, according to an Intelligencer report from 2016.
More recently, in March 2024, Boeing expert Simon Hardy told The Sun that he believes that Zaharie Ahmad Shah had been “suicidal” and had intentionally killed everyone on board MH370. One part of Hardy’s theory relies on an area in the Indian Ocean known as the Geelvinck Fracture Zone, a trench frequently plagued by earthquakes that could hypothetically bury the lost plane under a mountain of rocks to ensure it was never found.
NetflixFariq Abdul Hamid, the young co-pilot in the cockpit with Zaharie Ahmad Shah during the doomed flight.
“Imagine Miracle on the Hudson but everyone is already dead… nobody gets out and it sinks to the bottom of the Southern Indian Ocean. Nobody opens a door,” Hardy theorized. “Where does all the wreckage go? Well, there isn’t any, that’s why we’ve been deprived of wreckage.”
However, Malaysian police have found no concrete evidence that Shah was suffering from any personal or financial struggles leading up to the aircraft’s disappearance. He, and his young co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, were closely investigated down to their health, their tone of voice on recorded communications, and even their gait as they walked to their job on the day of the doomed flight, and officials were unable to find any abnormalities.
Shah’s family members have insisted that he was a “scapegoat,” and colleagues described him as a dedicated professional and passionate aviator with no obvious motive for a mass murder-suicide.
A new search for the missing plane was green-lit by the Malaysian government in March 2025, which could help to finally answer lingering questions and finally give some closure to families who lost their loved ones.
Until the main wreckage of the aircraft is located and recovered, though, the true story of what happened aboard MH370 during those final hours will remain one of aviation’s most haunting unsolved mysteries.
After reading about the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, explore the mysteries of the Alaska Triangle, where more than 20,000 people have vanished. Or, learn about the infamous Bermuda Triangle, the patch of the Atlantic Ocean where countless people have disappeared.
