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 intended path, turning west across the Malay Peninsula.
The plane, a Boeing 777 carrying 239 people from 15 countries, is believed to have veered off course and flown south several hours after losing radar contact. 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 returned no answers, no victims, and no plane.
What caused the plane to swerve and its exact location today remains one of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time. This week, officials suggested a new search operation could be launched.
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 conducted largely 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 called off the underwater search for the plane after combing more than 46,000 square miles of the Indian Ocean floor. That effort cost $150 million.
The following January, the Malaysian government began another search in cooperation with Ocean Infinity after receiving pressure from the families of the missing passengers and crew. Months later, a search effort led by Ocean Infinity ended, with no evidence of the plane’s whereabouts found.
Was there any debris found?
Although a wrecked plane has never been found, about 20 pieces of debris believed to be from the plane have been found off the coasts of the African mainland and on the islands of Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues.
In summer 2015, investigators determined that a large object washed ashore on Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean, was a flaperon from a Boeing 777, so it was likely debris from Flight 370.
Another piece of debris, a triangular piece of fiberglass composite and aluminum with “No Step” written on its side, was found in February 2016 on an uninhabited sandbank off the coast of Mozambique.
Then, the Australian government confirmed in September 2016 that a wing that flew over a Tanzanian island was from Flight 370. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau matched its identifiers with the numbers of the missing Boeing 777.
What are the theories about the disappearance of the plane?
There are many theories, from the outlandish to the ridiculous, about what caused the plane to disappear. In fact, there are too many to name here. The lack of information about what happened to 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 bad pilot, or that the plane was hijacked.
What did the official government report say?
After more than four years of search and investigation, a 495-page report released in 2018 did not provide conclusive answers about the fate of the airliner. The lack of concrete answers has devastated the victims’ families, who are hoping for some closure.
Kok Soo Chon, the head of the safety investigation team, said the available evidence – including the plane’s manual deviation from its flight course and the turning off of a transponder – “inevitably points” to “unlawful interference,” which could indicate that the plane has been hijacked. But there is no evidence of who may have interfered, or why.
The report also scrutinized all the passengers and the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and the first officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid. The report looked at the men’s financial statuses, health, tone of voice in radio communications and even their gait as they walked to work that day. No abnormalities were found.
What happens next?
Now, a decade after the disappearance of the plane with no concrete answer or plane found, a new search is about to begin.
Malaysian officials said in a statement this week that the government is ready to discuss a new search operation after being approached by Ocean Infinity.
Oliver Plunkett, the chief executive of Ocean Infinity, said in a statement that the company is now in a position to search again some six years after its previous effort came up with no answers.
“This search is arguably the most challenging, and really involved one out there,” he said. “We are working with many experts, some outside of Ocean Infinity, to continue analyzing the data in hopes of narrowing the search area down to one where success is possible.”
