Introduction: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 239 passengers and crew on board. The disappearance of the flight remains one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries, despite extensive search and investigative efforts [3].
Timeline of Events:
- March 8, 2014: MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12:41 a.m. local time, heading for Beijing, China [2].
- 1:07 a.m.: The Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) transmitted its last data before being switched off [14].
- March 15, 2014: Nearly a week after the disappearance, officials remained uncertain about the fate of the jetliner [6].
- March 18, 2014: The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) began aerial searches for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean [7].
- April 2014: The search for MH370 entered its fourth week, with the plane believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from its original flight path [8].
- December 31, 2021: A report by Richard Godfrey and Dr. Hannes Coetzee detailed new tracking technology to help locate the missing aircraft [11].
- March 8, 2023: The Netflix documentary “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” premiered on the ninth anniversary of the flight’s disappearance [29].
Notable Theories and Investigations: Various theories have been proposed to explain the flight’s disappearance, including a deliberate act by the pilot to avoid detection before crashing the plane [20]. A British aeronautical engineer spent years investigating the case and suggested that the pilot generally avoided official flight routes after 18:00 UTC on the day of the disappearance, using waypoints to navigate on unofficial flight paths around the Malacca Strait and Sumatra [22].
Debris Findings: Since the disappearance, more than 20 pieces of debris believed to be from the aircraft have washed up along the African coast and on islands in the Indian Ocean [12].