Decades after Swissair Flight 111 would crash into pieces and dive down the waters of Nova Scotia, there would come another aircraft disaster that would leave the world questioning what really caused the powerful metal machine to come falling back to Earth and leaving its mark in the form of several hundred casualties. Across the other side of the globe, a Boeing 777 would be taking off well-into midnight on March 8th, 2014 from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to Beijing Capital International Airport, with it’s 239 occupants still completely oblivious to the notorious impression that their flight would put on the whole world for the coming years. Driven by 53 year old pilot in command Zaharie Ahmad Shah and 27 year old co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 reached it’s cruising altitude of 10,700 metres at 1:10am later that night, before the Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System would transmit its last transmission on the plane’s performance before being shut off soon after. The last voice communication from the crew occurs at 1:19 prior to the transponder being switched off about 2 minutes later, just as the aircraft was about to enter Vietnamese airspace. When the captain of another aircraft attempted to contact the crew of Flight 370 shortly after 1:30am and reported having only heard “mumbling” and static, concern began to grow within those who were just in contact with their plane and it’s crew, solidifying the fact that this dire contact had been lost.

Malaysian military and civilian radar was able to track the plane as it turned around and flew northwest over the Malay Peninsula, then northwest over the Strait of Malacca, before losing radar contact at 2:22 while it was recorded to be cruising over the Andaman Sea. An Inmarsat satellite was still able to track the plane every hour of its travel, with it’s last detection occurring at 8:11am, about 1 hour and 40 minutes after it was scheduled to land in Beijing. A search-and rescue effort was launched soon after these findings, initially concentrated towards the South China Sea before they were quickly moved to the Strait of Malacca. However, Inmarsat contact wasn’t disclosed until March 15, but any precise locations of the aircraft couldn’t be found through analyzing the signal. Even so, the search was later expanded to the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, western China, the Indian subcontinent, and Central Asia after it was determined that the signal from the plane might’ve been sent out within two arcs: either one that stretched from Java southward into the Indian Ocean, or the other that had stretched northward across from Vietnam to Turkmenistan. It wasn’t long before Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak would announce that Inmarsat and the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch concluded that based on their analysis of the final signals sent out by the plane, it was highly unlikely that anyone on board had survived.

On April 6th, an Australian ship had detected several acoustic pings that could’ve possibly originated from the Boeing 777’s flight recorder, originating about 2,000km northwest of Perth, Western Australia. However, all further searches that were conducted would find no debris, while investigative testing found that a faulty cable could’ve produced these pings instead. The first piece of debris from the plane wouldn’t be found until July 29, 2015, in which the right wing flaperon would be discovered along a beach on the French island of Réunion. Almost 26 more pieces of debris would be found along the shores of Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar, and Mauritius over the next year and a half ever since the initial discovery of the flaperon. Included in this bunch, at least two were positively identified as having come from Flight 370: a wing flap found in June on Pemba Island, and a plane wing fragment found in May in Mauritius. Approximately 17 of the 26 pieces that were recovered are thought to have likely come from the plane, although no true identification can be confirmed- these pieces are presumed to be a horizontal stabilizer, from the cabin interior, the engine cowling, or parts of flap track fairing. By studying these pieces of debris that had managed to be recovered, it was determined that the plane had not undergone a controlled descent, and suggests that the aircraft had been broken up- either while still in the air or from the impact against the ocean’s waves.

Not even two years after the disaster occured, the governments of Malaysia, Australia and China had jointly announced in January 2017 that they have since ceased all search efforts in relation to Flight 370 and its casualties. While American company Ocean Infinity had received permission from the Malaysian government to continue the search up until May 2017, they would issue their final reports on the aircraft in July 2018, in which they deemed that the event of mechanical malfunction having taken place was extremely unlikely and that “the change in flight path was likely the result of manual inputs”. Even so, no investigator would ever be able to determine why the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 37 even happened, and it’s likely that the world may never know exactly why such a disaster would take place.