MH370: THE PLANE THAT VANISHED

MH370 pushed back from Kuala Lumpur International Airport just after midnight on March 8, 2014, cleared for a scheduled 00:35 departure and airborne at 00:41. Aboard were 227 passengers and 12 crew — 239 people in total, representing 14 nationalities. The largest single group, 153 passengers, were Chinese nationals; 38 were Malaysian. Among the passengers were a group of Malaysian and Chinese calligraphers and artists returning from an exhibition, a young couple who had just gotten married, and two Malaysian technicians who had worked on the Boeing 777 program.

In command was Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, a veteran Malaysia Airlines pilot with 18,365 flight hours — among the most experienced captains in the airline's fleet, and a Boeing 777 flight simulator enthusiast known for building his own home simulator rig. Beside him sat First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, who had roughly 2,763 flight hours and was on this flight completing his final supervised check flight on the 777 before being cleared to fly the type unsupervised. Ten cabin crew completed the crew complement.

The aircraft itself, registration 9M-MRO, was a Boeing 777-200ER delivered new to Malaysia Airlines in 2002 — one of the most reliable widebody airliners ever built, with an in-service safety record that was, at the time, essentially spotless. Nothing about the aircraft's maintenance history, and nothing in the routine pre-departure checks, gave any indication of what was about to happen.

The flight plan was unremarkable: climb to cruise altitude, track northeast over the South China Sea toward Vietnamese airspace, then on across China to Beijing Capital International Airport, a journey of roughly six hours. For the first thirty-eight minutes, it was exactly that — a routine widebody climb-out on a clear night, indistinguishable from thousands of other flights that depart Kuala Lumpur every year.

Sometime around the same window its transponder went dark, MH370 made a sharp turn to the left — reversing course, away from Vietnam and back across the Malay Peninsula, roughly retracing its outbound path near where it had started. Malaysian military radar, reviewed only in the days after the disappearance once officials realized what the returns showed, tracked the aircraft crossing back over northern Malaysia and out over the Strait of Malacca, the waterway separating Malaysia from Sumatra, Indonesia.

Preliminary radar data, reported by the New York Times in 2015 and never fully confirmed in Malaysia's official reports, suggested the aircraft may have climbed as high as 45,000 feet — above the Boeing 777's certified ceiling — shortly after the turn, then later descended to around 23,000 feet before climbing again toward a more normal cruise altitude. If accurate, that profile is difficult to explain as anything other than deliberate manual control; investigators have never officially confirmed either the climb or the descent as fact, and we've flagged that distinction here rather than present a leaked, unconfirmed detail as settled.

The first phase, in March 2014, was a surface and air search across the South China Sea and Strait of Malacca — the visible parts of MH370's confirmed track — involving aircraft and ships from 26 countries before the Inmarsat analysis redirected everything toward the Southern Indian Ocean. Once the search shifted there, Australia's Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) took over coordination on behalf of a tripartite agreement between Malaysia, Australia and China.

From 2014 to January 2017, ships towing side-scan sonar and, later, the autonomous underwater vehicle Bluefin-21, methodically mapped roughly 120,000 square kilometers of seafloor along the seventh arc — much of it previously uncharted ocean floor, including underwater mountain ranges never before surveyed in detail. The effort cost an estimated A$200 million, funded primarily by Australia and Malaysia. It found shipwrecks, geological formations, and nothing from MH370. On January 17, 2017, the tripartite governments suspended the search.

In January 2018, private marine exploration firm Ocean Infinity resumed the hunt under a “no find, no fee” contract with the Malaysian government — meaning Malaysia would only pay if the wreckage was actually located. Using a fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles deployed from the vessel Seabed Constructor, Ocean Infinity covered roughly 112,000 square kilometers, including areas outside the original search zone, before the contract concluded in May 2018. It, too, found nothing.

The search has not stayed closed. See Still Missing below for what's happened since — including a renewed Ocean Infinity search that was still actively working the seafloor as recently as January 2026.