A Boeing 777 With 239 People Turned Around in the Dark and Vanished. MH370.

At 12:42 a.m. on Saturday, March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing.

On board were 227 passengers from more than a dozen countries and 12 crew members. The flight was supposed to take less than six hours.

At 1:19 a.m., a voice from the cockpit said, "Good night, Malaysian three seven zero."

Two minutes later, the plane disappeared from air traffic control screens.

It has never been found.

Good night

Flight 370 was a Boeing 777, one of the safest airliners in the world.

It climbed to its cruising height over the South China Sea, heading north toward Vietnam. At 1:19 a.m., as the plane left Malaysian airspace, controllers in Kuala Lumpur told the crew to contact controllers in Ho Chi Minh City.

The reply was the last words ever heard from the plane.

At 1:21 a.m., the plane's transponder, the device that tells air traffic control where a plane is, stopped working. To civilian controllers, Flight 370 had vanished.

Vietnamese controllers noticed it had not checked in. It was some time before anyone realized something was seriously wrong.

The turn

The plane had not vanished. It was still flying.

Malaysian military radar later showed that, just after the transponder went silent, the plane turned sharply west, back toward Malaysia.

It flew back across the Malay Peninsula, passed just south of the island of Penang, and headed out over the Strait of Malacca.

At 2:22 a.m., military radar tracked it for the last time, about 250 nautical miles northwest of Penang, flying out over the Andaman Sea.

The military saw the unidentified aircraft but did not act at the time.

The handshakes

What happened next is known only from a satellite.

The plane had a system that connected to the company Inmarsat's satellites. Even without sending messages, it automatically answered a satellite's "are you there?" signal about once an hour, a so-called handshake.

These handshakes did not record the plane's position. But by measuring the time each signal took, investigators could work out how far the plane was from the satellite at each moment. Each measurement drew an arc, a curved line on the map, somewhere along which the plane must have been.

There were seven arcs. The last full handshake came at 8:10 a.m. Then, at 8:19 a.m., the plane sent a partial handshake, which investigators believe happened when it ran out of fuel and its systems restarted.

At 9:15 a.m., the satellite called again. There was no answer.

By analyzing the signals, investigators concluded that the plane flew south for about six hours, far out over the southern Indian Ocean, and came down somewhere along the seventh arc, west of Australia.

The search

The search for MH370 became the largest and most expensive in aviation history.

It began in the South China Sea, then moved to the southern Indian Ocean once the satellite data was understood. Ships and planes from many countries searched the surface. In April 2014, searchers detected signals they hoped were from the plane's black boxes. A search of the sea floor found nothing.

From late 2014 until January 2017, ships led by Australia mapped about 120,000 square kilometers of the deep ocean floor. They found old shipwrecks. They did not find MH370.

In 2018, the American company Ocean Infinity searched another large area on a "no find, no fee" basis. It found nothing.

In 2025, Ocean Infinity returned, again on a no find, no fee deal with Malaysia. It searched in two rounds, in March 2025 and from December 31, 2025, to January 23, 2026, covering about 7,500 square kilometers of new sea floor. It ended the search without finding the plane. The company's chief executive said they were confident it wasn't where they had looked.

The debris

In July 2015, a piece of wing called a flaperon washed up on the beach on Reunion Island, a French island in the western Indian Ocean, thousands of kilometers from the search zone. In September 2015, investigators confirmed it came from MH370.

It was the first proof that the plane had ended in the Indian Ocean.

Over the following years, more pieces were found on the coasts of Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius and Tanzania. By late 2017, about 20 pieces had been examined, and 18 were judged very likely or almost certain to be from the plane.

Ocean currents can carry debris across the ocean in about the time these pieces took to arrive, which fits a crash in the southern Indian Ocean.

What the reports say

In 2017, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said it could not determine why the plane went missing.

In 2018, Malaysia's official investigation released its final report. It concluded that the plane was turned back and flown off its route deliberately, by hand, just after 1 a.m., "either by the pilot or a third party." It said it could not determine who did it, or why.

No one has ever been charged in connection with the disappearance. The investigators did not blame any named person, and neither do we.

What we still don't know

Who turned Flight 370 around, and why?

What happened in the cockpit between 1:19 a.m. and 1:21 a.m.?

Where on the seventh arc did it come down?

And for the families of the 239 people on board, still waiting more than a decade later, will the main wreckage, and the flight recorders that might answer these questions, ever be found?